Assessment: Fecundity

In his article on Internet Epistemology, Thagard uses Alvin Goldman's criteria to assess the contributions that the Internet has made to the acquiring of knowledge. He defines fecundity by the capacity it has to lead to large numbers of true beliefs or results for numerous participants (cf. Thagard, 1997). Digg.com has the potential to meet this standard. Like the Internet and the World Wide Web that allow its existence, Digg can give people the answers that they seek in a way that is almost immediately accessible, even for those who are not affluent (Thagard, 1997).

Digg is a cooperative identification and evaluation website that uses many types of technologies to meet the goals of its users. It spreads knowledge through social interaction, though it is often indirect. By sharing discovered facts, Diggers are exhibiting a prominent feature of human civilization that makes the diffusion of information and, ultimately, knowledge easy, fast and less expensive or time consuming than the independent discovery of that knowledge. The dissemination of true information has even more veritistic value if it is new information (Goldman, 1999). Knowledge sharing through social interaction is an inherently fecund practice. More people can profit from more information because it is communicated.

When Digg began in December of 2004 as a personal project of the 29-year-old Kevin Rose, its major emphases were on technology, science and gaming; and its major medium was news articles. Techies loved its "[h]ardcore articles about how to make the Roomba robotic vacuum Roomba into a serial interface . . . and secret poetry for hackers in Apple's OS X 10.4.4" (Bulik, 2006). The second item was on the site's front page because the 80,000 registered diggers voted it there. Within a two-year span, Digg added world and business, sports and entertainment to its category choices. Digg widened its capability and Diggers expanded their contributions to include blogs, videos, and podcasts. Soon the site had a "platform from which to rank and share all content"(Bulik, 2006). Because of its willingness to branch out and meet its users epistemological wants and needs (it constantly adds and updates elements that make it more user-friendly and interesting), Digg is constantly attracting new members (not to mention casual viewers). By March of 2006, the site had an average 800,000 visitors per day (Arrington, 2006). Now it has millions of users ("Digg: More Content Changes Coming," 2007).

Digg has a number of features that allow people to tailor the ways that they gain knowledge through the site, and the growth in the community reflects this (Arrington, 2006). We will discuss a few of them (going into too much detail is beyond the scope of this assignment). In additon to the informational blogs, videos and podcasts that the members add to the site, the Digg site produces Diggnation, a podcast on the week's most popular stories, hosted by the founders. The most recent podcast as of November 18, 2007, "Beware of Herpes" discussed a number of topics, including the "Xbox 360 in Japan, Rabbit avoids death, Star Wars in one pic, Downloadable Xbox games, Circuit City scandal, Peter Griffin lives!, [and] Blu-Ray DRM cracked" (Diggnation, November 16, 2007). Although they tend to lean more toward technology, these podcasts can be varied in their subject matter. They are very informal, often funny and always informational. They are successful at informing Digg users about topics of interest to them and, through their comment section they can be a means of debate and shared knowledge.

Digg's search function has undergone a number of metamorphoses since the site's inception, so that it continually becomes more and more epistemologically sound. It quickly leads legions of people to the information that they need. In September of 2005, RSS was incorporated into Digg search. It enables Diggers to "create cusom live feeds based on [their] search criteria ("Digg search now with RSS"). In January of the next year, because of user requests, Digg lifted restrictions on searching burried stories and added the ability to find stories by unique URL ("New Digg Features Launched Today").

One of the most engaging epistemological features of the site, and one that impacts fecundity a great deal, is Digg's use of comment windows. It is here that the conversation about the articles really takes off, and personally, it has been helpful in decision-making (especially about technology) even when there was not the time to read the original articles. Most recently, Digg added helpful updates to the comment system that included having the ability to set how many threads are viewable at one time. This limits the time Diggers spend trolling the posts, and allows them more options for comparing submitted comments. As far as fecundity is concerned, it allows more access to more information (and, of course, speed is an element here, too). Digg also allows child threads to be viewed in the comments section even when the user has burried the parent comment. It is also possible to rate and rank comments (Stump, 2007). This allows even more access to yet more information for even more people.

Some of The Official Digg Tools are the result of wonderfully epistemologically fecund concepts. With these, Digg news can be posted on anyone's website, thus allowing more people the access to that information. One can also integrate Digging into a site, which encourages more stories to reach the front page--so that it is read by more people ("Official Digg Tools," n.d.). Other Official Digg Tools are Digg Arc (the newest tool) that exhibits stories, topics and containers connected in a sphere. Digg BigSpy puts dugg stories at the top of the screen. As new stories are dugg, older ones move down toward the bottom of the screen. Digg Stack (the Power section has an example) shows the diggs taking place as they happen. Digg Swarm draws a circle for stories as diggers choose them. Diggers can then "swarm around stories and make them grow." Digg Spy v2 is an "autorefreshing realtime view of Digg now with spying [for] all stories, front page stories and queued stories" ("Amazing Digg Tools Collection"). Again, these are not all of the tools Digg offers, but even with the descriptions of the elements in this small sample it is easy to see just how limitless the possibilities are for making people aware of the information available, and so, giving them access to it.

In spite of all of the positive things that Digg contributes to epistemological fecundity, Digg has had to struggle (almost constantly) with limits in this area, whether by the inadequacies of the site itself or the deliberate actions of some Digg users. One possible problem for Digg is that none of the content is technically original--of course, epistemologically, this could lead to the site giving access to information that is more likely reliable. However, it can also lead to less opportunity for knowledge sharing. The site also does not allow editing of the material submitted. Descriptions can only be altered for up to 10 minutes after they are initially submitted, so that if a submitter realizes a mistake it cannot be easily or obviously corrected. Comments can only be editted for up to two minutes after they are posted.

As was stated above, Digg does not produce content that has not been seen elsewhere, but it does have a mutually helpful relationship with prominant news organizations. Top Diggers have the power to potentially to "drive a significant amount of Web traffic" back to those organizations (Cohn, 2007). On any given day, a story voted to Digg's front page can generate an extra ten- to fifteen thousand visitors for a site (Cohn, 2007). In itself, this is not a downfall; in fact, it only proves Digg to be a great supporter of fecundity. The concerns with this situation are two: 1) authors sometimes self-submit, gaining readers for their own stories--a possible breach of ethics; and 2) Other sites have offered large sums of money to top front-page contributers in order to get more of their information and product to the front page. This is against Digg policy, but it is difficult to police on a site that has so many users (Cohn, 2007). Digg has recently tried to combat these practices by altering the algorithm that establishes which contributions make the front page. The result is that it is now more difficult to get contributions to the front page ("Digg Friends," 2007). Web societies have emerged to try and manipulate the algorithm by inflating stories' votes (Cohn, 2007). These actions of some may cause others to experience a chilling effect. Why submit a story when it is possible the top stories are only in that position because votes have been erroneously attributed to them? A related action its creating fake accounts in order to promote a story to the front page. This is one of the many ways that people have tried to "game" Digg, though this becomes harder to do as the site grows (Arrington, 2006).

Another problematic trend for Digg has been the "bury brigade." Although Digg has continually taken steps to combat this, users seem to continually take steps to accomplish it as well, thus it is a fight that never ends. The "bury brigade" is a small number of diggers who "bury" stories "without accountability" (Johnson, 2007). Users of the site are given this option so that spam and imprecise or erroneous stories can be weeded out. There has long seemed to be a trend for people to bury stories that are completely accurate and the only conclusion is that they do not agree with the stories' content (Johnson, 2007). Burying of legitimate stories limits the fecundity of Digg because people will not have access to the information they need to formulate true beliefs or obtain ultimately useful results.

There have also been reports of Digg censoring stories that offend sponsors. There was a byline to this effect posted on Digg itself, but the actual story could not be accessed. The comments to this story were interesting. One stated that stories that are out-voted off the front page disappear from all search results and the history as well. Of course, this may all just be conjecture and venting by someone who was upset that a story they submitted did not stay on the front page. Other commenters accused the original poster of practicing "Yellow Journalism." Still, the possibility of it is troubling in a site that has so much potential to practice fecundity. (See the post).

Another way in which Digg may be fecundity-limited is voiced in complaints that the articles that make the front page are those that follow the party line. One blogger wrote:

People are sheep. People don't vote things up they disagree with, don't like or don't know anything about. So we see a kind of convergence. The stuff that to[w]s the community line, that most people agree with and that doesn't challenge people too much gets voted on, whilst the stuff on the fringes, the niche stuff, disappears. The . . . content becomes stale, repetitive and dull (Taylor, 2006).

If this is a prevalent occurrence then it is an epistemic concern for any user. The fecundity of a practice is limited by the all-too-dominant opinions of a group interested only in one line or object of thought.

These epistemological worries aside, Digg has the potential and ability to become a fecund powerhouse of information, especially as it continues to expand its user base more widely beyond American borders, and beyond the techy community that still tends to dominate it (Cohn 2007).