I am not a political blogger, but I am a political person. I try to keep current on what’s going on in the world and, specifically, in my country. I have many debates and conversations with others, both informed and underinformed.
I’ve been a member of Digg since November 2005. (Probably everyone knows what Digg is since the Great Digg Revolt of ’07.) Not only do I enjoy the user-submitted aspect, but I enjoy being a part of the system that allows the users to determine what is or isn’t "popular". It’s my kind of (virtual) town.
In my experience, Digg has always been, by default, a polarized place. When it was focused on technology it was Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Linux; when it moved to add general news and politics, it was divided down party lines as well, but recently there has been an interesting bipartisan cooperation brewing.
If you’ve been paying attention to the Republican debates (which I still think are happening WAY too soon), then you may have noticed the inclusion of a fringe-candidate named Ron Paul. To be completely honest, the guy strikes me as a joke, but the events that I’ve witnessed on Digg have concerned me.
Paul is mostly Libertarian, which is fine, but I believe he takes it too far. Having read as much as I have, I’m concerned that (on the off-chance that he actually won) he would not actually lead the country, or, to rephrase, would actively NOT lead. My concern is not for him as a Republican candidate, but the idea that he might garner the Libertarian nomination and, with an upcoming election that could better support a third-party candidate than we’ve seen since Ross Perot, that would be a frightening prospect with the tool-like candidates that the two major parties are likely to prop up.
Paul’s supporters think that they have launched a grassroots effort, but in the wake of the Digg Revolt, the tactics have changed from word-of-mouth to an outright spamming. It’s gone beyond "getting the word out" and has turned into blatantly submitting the same stories from (sometimes) different sources over and over and over and over, ad infitium.
Time was, people created conspiracy theories about a "Bury Brigade". That is, an organized group of people hell-bent on repressing stories on a specific topic or from a specific source. Let me tell you, from what I’ve seen, there’s not a whole lot of organization among Digg users at all. People digg what they like and bury what they don’t and, with few exceptions, the regular users, the community of Digg pretty much just does their own thing.
It broke my heart a little when the users "revolted", whatever their reasons were. It wasn’t because I disagreed with what they were saying, but because I have invested a decent amount of time and effort into being a part of the Digg community, albeit a quiet one. To see the entire site flooded with a single issue – one that didn’t matter to a large portion of the community was hard to take, but it was so overwhelming that there really wasn’t much that could be done about it.
That is not the case now. While the Paul supporters submit and flood the site, it is not the will of the community. It is not a single instance, surrounding a single issue, but an incessant attack by a small group of people. And the community is not going to just sit back and watch it happen.
The partisan lines have fallen and the community is uniting. We may not be able to agree on a computer platform or a socio-economic policy, we may not agree on religion or sexual orientation or nutrition, we may not agree on anything else, but we can agree on one thing: We are invested in this community and we’re not going to see it fall.
Some might call it united in a hatred of spammers. Some might call it united against a common enemy, but I think the truth is simpler than that. We have found a single thing that we all love. And we are united in that.
Heh… and probably nothing else };^>