You may be certain, but so far a year long undercover investigation has yet to prove there is an elite cabal of liberals desperately manipulating information in an attempt to skew towards their viewpoint.
Or, perhaps, the feeling that conservative content is underrepresented is because of something more benign -- maybe more liberals visit Digg than conservatives?
A yearlong investigation to uncover a voting ring on Digg isn't impressive, it's bloody incompetence. It shouldn't have taken more than a week, if that. I left Digg, gosh, three, four years ago now, because it was pretty obvious even then that Digg was basically just a collection of voting cabals of various levels of interconnectedness. People were writing articles about it and stuff. People were writing how-to articles, which channels on IRC and how to set up your own IRC-based rings.
Talking about how a conservative group briefly has the upper hand is like observing which pig has briefly risen to the top of the muck pile. Don't worry, I'm sure counter-conservatives will be rallying behind this story to overpower them in another iteration of the endlessly-boring cycle and I look forward to reading about how it singlehandedly proves liberalism is a cabalistic conspiracy on a wide collection of right-leaning sites run by the sort of people who still think Digg votes matter.
So given that it was an obvious problem 3-4 years ago, do you think it might be possible that Digg, Inc. might have recognized the problem and done something about it?
And that this whole right-wing conspiracy might amount to a bunch of people pumping up their egos while basically spinning their wheels?
They did "stuff", but ultimately Digg's philosophy limits what they can actually do. They're all about "power to the people", and in an online voting context that leads directly to voting cliques, as inevitably as Duverger's law leads to two major parties. You can't fix the cliques without also destroying power-to-the-people. To Digg's credit, they've tried to be true to their philosophy. Unfortunately, it's not possible.
In fact Digg and a couple of other technologies taught me the foolishness of "power to the people". You don't want to democratize every site on the internet. You want to allow a million flowers to bloom, everyone to have their say but in their own space that they control. This produces a much healthier environment. It pisses off some people that their soapbox doesn't grow as large as they believe it should by virtue of their obvious innate greatness, but I've come to see this as a feature, not a bug.
No, power to the people as a philosophically-organizing principle was quite popular around the time Digg was created. The idea is that the big problem with the world is that the control is all in the hands of $WRONG_GROUP and the correct solution is just to democratically hand all the power out to your userbase and it'll all just magically work because you've solved the underlying problem.
The error of this thinking was the downfall of Digg, and for another example, Third Voice. Also, numerous blog owners initially fell for the idea that removing comments from their site is "censorship" on par with how evil it is when governments do it, and this idea is still current, even though it's nothing more than a recipe for getting destroyed by trolls after a certain critical mass is obtained. Like I said, the right answer is something else entirely. It's a recurring cycle on the Internet; somebody decides power-to-the-people is the way to go, the problems become manifest, the community takes action to contain the damage or simply flames out entirely, and some idealistic group of people get pissed off, declare that the people are now powerless and it's time for power to the people, starting the cycle over again. I've watched at least 3 iterations of this over the past 10 years. We're due for another "power to the people" explosion which right now is most likely to manifest in the distributed-Facebook community.
"but so far a year long undercover investigation has yet to prove there is an elite cabal of liberals desperately manipulating information in an attempt to skew towards their viewpoint."
That's just because their better at it than the Cons. Cue music from the Twilight Zone....
I'm having trouble parsing this statement. Are you saying that Liberals, suspicious of something fishy, launch an investigation and are therefor the same as the people who are actively engaging in extremely unscrupulous and dishonest behavior?
Also, I'm not sure what to make of: "Happens all of the time aka US Congress." Does AKA have a meaning other than "also known as" that I don't know about?
Or, perhaps, the feeling that conservative content is underrepresented is because of something more benign -- maybe more liberals visit Digg than conservatives?