Digg Profile Rankings Completely Deleted

By Amit Chowdhry ● Feb 5, 2007

I haven’t seen anyone on the web more loyal to any one website than the Digg community.

Some of the top Digg users spend hours submitting news stories, adding friends, interacting with other Digg users, and digging hundreds and thousands of stories published to the news bookmarking and social network website.

I actually think some of them deserve trophies for the amount of work they put in, but because there are no trophies available, there was the list of the Top Digg users which was taken off the website last week.

What caused the removal of the Top Digg users page? It was because some web companies were offering top Digg users to accept payment for story submission, thus giving the website a major boost in traffic.

Before, it was just the removal of the Top Digg Users and today, I found out that users will no longer receive a ranking, period.

What this means is that proactive Digg users like the #1 Digg user digitalgopher may not receive as much attention as he has gotten in the past.  Digitalgopher was recently accredited as being the first user to submit 1,000 stories to make it to the homepage.

Stories make it to the homepage based on how fast user-submitted news stories are voted or dugg past a certain number.

If the story receives a certain number of votes within a certain amount of time, it will be added to the homepage.

Con: I wouldn’t say that there still isn’t an incentive to be proactive on Digg, but it definetely does provide less motivation to become active.

Pro: I still believe that top Digg users will be sought after by advertisers somehow, but it will take an extra amount of time to figure out who they are. They may have to visit and explore the Digg website a little bit more frequently. But because Digg users are loyal and sometimes not greedy, those companies are sometimes exploited.

Update: Thanks to a comment tip from Kyle on this post, we have learned that TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington is somehow allegedly involved with top Digg user webtech (Orli Yakuel).

WebTech consistently submits nearly all recent TechCrunch and CrunchNote posts to Digg and since WebTech is a top Digg user, almost all of her submitted articles make it to the Digg.com homepage, thus giving TechCrunch a substantial amount of traffic.

Orli Yakuel is also a co-founder of Go2Web20, who Arrington sponsors. And the rumor is that Yakuel is Arrington’s ex-girlfriend. Whether this is true or not, I cannot verify personally. But I guess the gossip just makes this post more exciting.