*update: practically hours after Digg removed the top user list, someone recreated the list on an independent web site - just as predicted in this article.

According to Kevin Rose and his latest post on Digg’s official blog, Digg will be removing the top user list feature.

To try to understand the consequences of this we must go back to how Digg’s ecosystem works. Digg consists of diggers, creators and submitters.

The first group, the diggers, browses the site looking for news, and contributes mostly by digging stories. By this, they gain two things: satisfaction of making their vote count, and the fact that dugg stories are saved in their Digg profile for later reference. Their payoff isn’t huge, but it’s also extremely easy to contribute in this way.

The second group creates the content, and is not tied to Digg itself. But, they would like their content to get noticed by diggers, because it brings them recognition and traffic. They often lurk on Digg and contribute by occasional digging and submitting.

The third group, the submitters, are the people who submit stories not only because they like the content, but also because they want to increase their influence on Digg. This influence is represented by the top user list. It is also palpable, as top list users’ votes are “stronger” than the votes of other users. The exact algorithm is not known, but for the sake of simplicity we can simply imagine that one top user vote counts as 2 or 3 or 4 normal votes. Submitters work hard to progress in Digg’s rank (it’s somewhat comparable to grinding in World of Warcraft), and their payoff can be considerable.

Let me explain further. If you’re one of the top users (which is no small feat and at this point takes several months of hard work), you have a huge influence on the entire internet. I’m not kidding. Digg is a very powerful site. Not only it has millions of visits, it is also viewed daily by thousands of professional journalists looking for news. Being a top digger gives you the power to give recognition to others. Basically, you’re one of the editors of the internet. This can have all sorts of consequences, but the point is that many top diggers won’t just sit and wait for their influence to be taken away.

Now, let’s look at the quote from Kevin Rose:

So, the top user list will be removed, and other lists will be introduced, based on interests and not on the number of successful (the ones that reach the front page) submissions. This doesn’t sound like a bad decision. But it has very important consequences. Digg is like a state. The top users are the democratically elected leaders.

Now, can you imagine that any state, in which some group has more influence than others, can be returned to the state of everyone being 100% equal? I can’t. The power can only shift to another group. It can get concentrated and diluted. Digg is trying to dilute it. Can they really do it? We’ll see. Let’s take a look at another important point.

The thing is, what Kevin Rose didn’t say is whether the number of successful submissions will still be an influence in the voting system. This is important.

Because, if the number of successful submissions remains a factor in the voting system, then someone (and I’m 100% sure of this) will simply recreate the top user list on an independent site. If everything stays the same, and top users are still really top users (only it’s not officially acknowledged), then it’s trivial to keep maintaining this list separately from Digg.

It would be the opposite of what usually happens: a popular service lacks a feature, so someone makes a hack, the owners of the site recognize the hack as good, the hack gets integrated into the site. In this case, a feature (good or bad, it doesn’t matter - it’s important and that’s all that matters) gets removed from a site, so someone makes an independent hack so they can continue using the feature.

On the other hand, if the algorithm which calculates how much the votes of top users are “worth” changes, the top user list will truly become obsolete. In this case, I can imagine several scenarios.

a) the votes of all users become equal in importance.

In this case, who’s friends with who will determine who’s the top user. Strong user networks will become the main way of being influential on Digg (they already are, actually, but in this case they would become a lot less transparent).

b) a new algorithm to determine the importance of users’ votes is implemented

It’s hard to determine what the algorithm would be, and therefore it’s even harder to determine its consequences. But, whatever happens, the top list will still be effective: maybe not visible, maybe not the same as before, but there will still be a top list in the collective mind of diggers.

I would like to add here that even if being a top user will stop having any direct influence on the voting system (or maybe I was wrong and it never had influence anyway, although many top diggers seem to agree with me on this one), it’s still possible that someone will continue to maintain an independent top user list just for fun. I don’t really think Digg can do anything about it. They’re a community site, and if the community decides to do this, there’s not much they can do.

In any case, this might prove to be a very interesting occurrence on the Internet. Digg has grown big. Can the owners of the site which is run almost completely by the community really control what the community does? Are the top digg users a homogeneous, powerful group which can change the course of events if they choose to? Am I just a crazy person who’s reading too much into this? I’m looking forward to finding out the answers.