10e20 Blog

Last night, Digg founder Kevin Rose posted on the offical Digg blog about a few changes that were being made. These changes were in response to lots of different stories about people gaming Digg and the unfairness he felt this put on the Digg top users:

Which leads me to a disappointing trend that we’ve noticed over the past several months. Some of our top users – the people that have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours finding and digging the best stuff – are being blamed by some outlets as leading efforts to manipulate Digg. These users have been listed on the “Top Diggers” area of the site that was created in the early days of Digg when there was a strong focus on encouraging people to submit content.

As a result they made an internal decision to remove the Top Users section forever. This has sparked a pretty heated debate throughout Digg nation. As of this morning you could still check the Top Users section (for example: http://www.digg.com/topusers/page2) but I just checked right now and see that they have done a permanent server redirect via 301 from all the Top User pages to the Digg blog:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently =>
Age => 0
Date => Fri, 02 Feb 2007 17:13:32 GMT
Connection => Keep-Alive
Via => NS-CACHE-6.1: 99
ETag => “KXCCKMCIMGUMRVWN”
Server => Apache
Location => http://blog.digg.com/
Content-Length => 291
Keep-Alive => timeout=5, max=9999
Content-Type => text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

In addition, the Top Users link has also been removed from the Digg bottom bar.

One suggestion - permanently redirect it to the specific post so that people can see your reasoning behind it (rather than just to the blog homepage).

Update: Chris Finke has hacked together a page which recreates the Top Users - check out his post here and a direct link to the list here.