Will Digg Be a Better Place Without Shouts?

In case you haven’t heard, yesterday Digg removed the controversial “shout” feature that allowed users to share stories with one another.  This feature was Digg’s only internal tool for communication that was put in place a little over a year and a half ago.

Digg Shout Screen

History

Shouts were supposed to even the playing field between ‘power users’ and the common Digger.  This feature allowed users to select a story that they enjoyed and send it directly to their friends on Digg.  Shouts did empower numerous Digg users and did help more stories gain awareness and become popular when otherwise they might not have.  However, one major problem occurred, the majority of users abused this, and used it as a spammy broadcast tool. This turned off many long-time users who turned off shouts, or simply left the site.

Spammy Shouts

Unfortunately, the problem with the system could not be fixed by just shutting it off.  This add-on turned the site from a ‘pull-oriented’ site where users scanned the best submissions to a ‘push-oriented’ site where votes on stories with shouts were hyper-inflated.  This bloated vote count would force the shouted stories to dwarf any regular submissions.  A quality post that wasn’t shouted might receive ½ the votes (and visibility) as a story promoted using the shout feature.  Much like the steroid era of the baseball, the majority of member began shouting all of their stories just to keep afloat.

Facebook & Digg

The Resolution

Digg has been eventually tuning its algorithm to try to discount the value of shouts, but at the end of the day it simply wasn’t working.  The first step in the direction of external promotion was the import of stories to Facebook that allowed users to share their Digg activity with friends.  The DiggBar and DiggURL were the next steps to move away from shouts, as it gave users the power to share on both Twitter and Faceboook with ease.  When they announced that they were moving to a “real-time” share system last week they finally admitted that the current internal promotion system was not working.

Now, all internal communication has been silenced and Digg is forcing its users away from the site to socialize.  This makes sense for Digg, because they can possibly gain a larger audience.  However, this is a risky move, as Digg is forcing users off of the site and onto other social sites.  Twitter has already demonstrated that popular stories can be aggregated in a Digg like fashion.

DiggBar ScreenShot

What Will Happen to Digg?

After the shout-pocalypse I believe that Digg will be a better place from a content perspective.  Average stories won’t be artificially inflated; articles will be back to being judged based on their content … not on who has motives behind it.  Without inflated (and irrelevant) votes, the Recommendation Engine will become a better asset for its heavy users.

One major negative byproduct of this shift to external promotion will be the loads of user endorsements that will soon flood your Twitter stream, Facebook wall or your inbox.

New Share Feature

Thoughts on the Decision

From a company perspective, I would never advocate sending users off-site for communication.  Digg has always flourished because it truly was a ‘social’ site where you could add friends, images and links, this however is a step in the opposite direction.

I had always believed that it wasn’t the concept of the shout system that was flawed, rather that it was the allotted usage that was the culprit.  When you allow all users to promote every story, the value of that promotion is voided, much like using the bold typography for an entire paragraph.  I think a solution that would have pleased both parties would have been a 1 shout per 24 hour limit, so users could only share their best find of the day.

Digg

Conclusion

While this may be a large change for many users, this change should help to increase the quality of content on Digg.  Whether you like it or not, the termination of shouts is now just another part of life, and another adaptation that active users will have to make.

Will it piss off those users that rely on shouts?  Absolutely.

Will it make it harder to get your stories on Digg?  Not if your content is awesome.

Will it add more Digg SPAM to Twitter, Facebook and Email?  Without a doubt.

What do you think? Will Digg be better or worse without Shouts?

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