Are Rose & Adelson digging their grave?

Over the past two days there has been a great commotion in the Digging world and my word but it’s been fascinating to observe! For those people that aren’t heavily involved in the social media scene this is what’s been going down…

Yesterday Digg 'launched a new algorithm to try and prevent groups of users from gaming the system.' This sounds perfectly reasonable to me but then again I’m not a top digger...

I do understand that Digg wants to give new people a chance to get on the front page, but don’t these people who have dedicated a lot of time and effort to Digg deserve some recognition for it? It seems to have been the last straw for top Diggers who feel they are being penalised and that Digg is no longer a democratic news site. They retaliated by writing an open letter to Digg airing these and other grievances. Understandable, I think, under the circumstances!

I think the worst of it has to be the wide spread complaints about the lack of communication from Digg. Of course they deny this fervently and say that they don’t intend to ignore messages sent to them and that they hope to put in place a method of two-way communication to alleviate these complaints, blah blah… But surely this should have been in place a long time ago!? Is it just me or are these people just playing a very dangerous game?

On a site like Digg, where we can have our say at anytime, with access to a great big audience, would it not be wise for Rose and Adelson to open up the doors of communication a little more? Shouldn’t they have communicated with Digg users before it got this far? Maybe they would have saved themselves a little of the negative publicity. What do you think? I would really appreciate your comments because it just baffles me!