AhmedF - 6:40 pm on Sep 11, 2006 (gmt 0)

I have to disagree with the general sentiment here.

Digg added controls to help make it easier to digg your friends' contributions/interests. Quite a few people have added me as their friend, and I have no clue how they are. Now if they are searching for stories, and they see it in green (to indiciate I or any other friend dugg it), they will be more likely to digg it.

What is this? Nothing more than exactly what Digg wanted. They wanted users digging the stories of other users. To insinuate that there was some digg cartel or that the top users were controlling everything is very simplistic. They have lots of friends who simply digg each other.

Sure, it may be a broken feature, but for Digg to publicly blame these very users (who not only submit, but also digg a lot of queued stories) seems to keep up with their previous 'blame everyone but us' mentality.

Lastly - if there is anything abused too much on Digg, it is the ability to bury a queued story. In fact, lets say I am from Competitor X. I could create 5 different aliases (on different computers), and start marking every single story submitted and dugg by the top 50 users as lame. What better way to drive away the most active users?

I'm starting to digress, but to summarize: The top users were simply using Digg's features, and Digg, while putting out its fancy 'Digg Labs' has quite a few holes in the system.