According to the official Digg blog, Digg’s community has grown to 1 million users. It’s really solid growth if you consider that at the beginning of the year the had less than 200.000 users, and it shows that their decision to switch from being purely a technology site to an all-rounder was the right one.

For them, at least. As much as Digg’s value, popularity, traffic and chances to sell for millions has increased, Digg has also been on a steady decline when one of its core strengths is concerned - news. With more users came more submissions, with more submissions came sensationalist titles, and with those all the important news is stuck in traffic. The core community - the one that so ardently diggs everything Apple and Google-related - is not such a strong presence any more. The top users no longer exist, and with their decline in participation (many former top users aren’t submitting stories any more) Digg’s “character” has changed. Furthermore, the new kids on the block who are taking their place understand that actual news - unless it’s really breaking news - has low chances of getting to the front page, so they turn to submitting single Flickr images, “believe it or not” facts of dubious origin, and old stories that were around before Digg and were never submitted.

This has hurt Digg, although perhaps not in the traffic/number of users kind of way. The IT professionals and journalists are turning away from Digg and Reddit (which was never about news anyway) and looking for better sources of information over at Tailrank, Megite and Techmeme. Slashdot - the site that has inspired Digg - has remained a credible news source simply because it’s edited. Although many are looking at Alexa’s stats and claiming that Digg has overrun Slashdot, Slashdot has actually remained a huge authority in the IT world while Digg is the WalMart of social content - lots of choices, hard to find quality stuff.

With the recent algorithm changes, which were introduced so quietly that most users didn’t even notice them, many blogs and smaller sites are silently banned, which did stop an inflation of senseless Digg-bashing stories, but has also alienated a big part of the community: the bloggers that saw Digg as a possibility to get instant-recognition. Some of these were just writing bad linkbait, but some tried very hard to write quality, creative articles because they knew that quality - at least when certain topics are concerned - will be recognized by diggers.

This last change has actually helped Digg to some extent. It is a big, invisible, editorial hand that sweeps everything that doesn’t have enough authority, and gives the A-list sites a clear path for breaking news. Digg’s front page is still littered with non-news stories, but now at least what little news goes through doesn’t get duplicated that much and has some credibility behind it.

However, to believe that Digg is still a democratic, non-editorial site where the users choose what goes on the front page is ludicrous. It’s a democracy where on a voting day, one party has a large, beautifully decorated, fruit-baskets-on-every-corner voting booth, while the other has nothing but a dilapidated desk and a cracked stool. Trying to submit stories from certain websites is pointless as they will get buried within seconds, and the number of these sites is not small and it is not limited to sites previously banned. Whatever the criteria are, it’s not based on what users are burying and it’s definitely not based on the quality, scope, focus and attitude of the articles.

So, although most of the million users (or perhaps the number is a little lower due to duplicate accounts) will still happily scurry about Digg and won’t notice much of these changes, Digg is a very different site than what it was a year ago. The sheer number of users is causing them problems, and they’re once again faced with the cold, hard truth - there’s no news without editors and focus. Will invisible editing through complex algorithms manage to increase the overall quality of the articles on Digg in the long run remains to be seen, but currently Digg is in a fight to keep growing, while regaining its credibility, without alienating its users. It’s a tough set of balls to keep in the air.