By Demotivating Its Top Users, Digg May Decline

Let me preface this post by saying I love Digg. It has become a site I rely on a lot for tech news, gossip and just plain old interesting stuff - like the Boeing 707 John Travolta keeps in his garage. But today Digg put a nail in its coffin by removing its leaderboard of the top diggers. Why? It may demotivate users.

To be fair, Digg is removing the list due to issues with spam and people who are gaming the system. That's a good thing. Further, on his blog (which by the way does not allow for comments) founder Kevin Rose says that  they soon plan to roll out "new features and programs that do a better job of rewarding positive contributions to the Digg community."

Unfortunately, Digg did not synchronize these two moves. One of the biggest motivations for the top Diggers is earning the right to be on that list. Further, the mere existence of the list spurs those who are just outside the velvet ropes work harder to ascend. Now that the list is gone, so is some of the fun.

Digg really now needs to create a system that rewards people a share of its advertising revenues based on their contributions. After all, without the users, there's no advertisers. Digg should compensate them using a system that's fair, ethical and easy to understand yet not game.

Now this is all very dicey since, potentially, if ad revenue were to decline, the users may migrate to other sites that have a stronger capitalization and can use it to reward. Yahoo, for example, could combine Yahoo Answers and del.icio.us into a similar site. This could be a big opportunity for del.icio.us in particular, which just topped 1.5M users - 50% more than Digg has.

This is a critical moment in Digg's short life. If they navigate it right, they will keep the community intact. One more slip, however, could open the door for a larger competitor to come in with a bigger carrot.