Practicum #6

This post is about the power the users of Digg and Reddit have. For Digg, the power of its users can be seen in the severe drop of users recently. Earlier this year, in August, Digg released a new version of Digg, with the response being overwhelmingly negative. Apparently, in the old Digg, which I had used, there were "power users" that dominated submissions into the site. It was also easier for groups to quickly popularize or bury a submission, depending on if they liked it. Ironically, eliminating these measures ruined Digg. The new Digg sought be more personalized based on the users interests, something that I would argue destroyed the sense of community within Digg by making it too dispersed. For me, I enjoyed visiting Digg to see the top submissions, which were usually popular for a reason. Digg users responded by holding a "quit Digg day," as well as submitting Reddits stories to Digg. There was one day in particular I can remember in which every single top submission to Digg was a link to a Reddit submission. Essentially, Digg lost the loyalty of their users, and the site has been in sharp decline ever since.

Regarding Reddit, there are several instances of its users using their collective power for good. For example, Prior to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert holding their rally in Washington DC earlier this year, a single Reddit user started a campaign to convince Colbert to hold a rally in Washington DC. Users caught on to the campaign, and responded by raising $500,000 for charity in order to gain attention. Colbert noticed the gesture, and even though him and Stewart have said that they had the idea for the rally before Reddit, Colbert has gone on to mention Reddit on his show. A few weeks ago, Colbert also answered questions from Reddit users in a special "guest appearance" on the site.

From these two examples, I think it is apparent that the users give Reddit and Digg their sense of community and identity. When that identity is forcefully changed, as in Digg's case, the users responded by leaving the website. In Reddit's case, when the users are allowed to form a community with their own identity, they responded by using their power to garner attention for the site in good ways.

I used Wikipedia briefly while writing this post to clarify a few facts regarding key events for Digg and Reddit