Wil Wheaton has a great story posted up over on his blog, entitled ‘What happened to Digg?‘.  He looks into the middle school mentality of the site, and why, basically, it’s started to suck over the past 6-8 months.

After the Yahoo Suggestions ‘raid’ by Digg user’s, it seems that a lot of people started taking notice.  Not the type of notice that the Digg community wanted ( namely, that Yahoo ripped off their lord and savior Kevin Rose ), but instead the type of notice that a middle school lunchroom gets once too many pre-teens have jammed in and are all collectively fighting with each other.

It would already appear that Yahoo is now on the Digg shitlist, along with Microsoft, the RIAA/MPAA, Sony, any corporation that is trying to turn a profit, and SEO blogs.  Example: This story hit the frontpage about the same Yahoo suggestion board now deleting suggestions, even though they were obviously spam and unnecessary.  And that won’t be the last, I expect hundreds of anti-Yahoo stories to start hitting the frontpage within hours of being submitted.  One blogger weighed in on the issue with the ‘Digg Mafia’, which will help turn the Digg frontpage into this ( in my opinion ):

2000 Diggs: Kevin Rose walks past me on street!!!!! AMAZING

2500 Diggs: Apple note found in trash can unveils possible Apple iCar in 2045!!!

8000 Diggs: Sony sucks, only posts $4million in profit on PS3!! LOL PS3 suxs!!

15000 Diggs: Upper class person missing somewhere in US, digg this up to help find them!

43000 Diggs: Apple blog posts 34 degree connection between M$ and RIAA!!! PROOF!! Boycott M$!!

34000 Diggs: Yahoo disses Ubuntu 3.4.5.6.7.4434.23.5664 2009 edition!! OMG

What can be done about this?  Really, nothing.  The Internet is host to many, many assholes, and by the popularity theorem, they will all congregate around the most popular site that will play host to their bitch-fests.  In a way, Digg is helping the rest of the community out by attracting all the teens/20 somethings to their site, and leaving resources such as Reddit.com open to the rest of us with a more intelligent thought pattern. ( Not that Reddit is any better, just has more stories and most comments lean toward Signal, rather than Noise. )

If webmasters would really like to start changing Digg’s behaviour, especially towards their rabid ‘community’, the most effective way would be to block digg traffic if you notice that you’re been ‘dugg’.  For this to be effective though, TechCrunch, Engadget, and the other heavy hitting blogs would have to come on board.

The bad side to an Interweb Boycott though, you miss out on the actual intelligent commentary that happens on some Digg stories. But, that usually is overshadowed by the cries of ‘Free speech!! 1st Amendment!!’ by children that haven’t even taken high school civics, so the balance is back in your favor