When my friends on Digg.com used to find something interesting, they would “shout” it to me.  I’d review the stories they sent me, and I would Digg the ones I liked.  This was the how we shared our findings on the vast space known as the world wide web.

Figure 1 - Despite this feature disappearing, I will still not join Twitter.

In late May, Digg announced that “shouts” were no longer going to be an accessible feature to notify your friends of articles on the site.  Let me take a step back.  For those of you not familiar with Digg or social bookmarking in general, I’ll fill you in.  Social bookmarking is a method for internet users to store, manage, share, and organize bookmarks of web pages.  I’ve written an article on social bookmarking here.  More specifically, Digg is a site where users submit images, articles, and videos in different categories, and other users “digg” or “bury” the links.  Those with the most “diggs” make it to the front page, where they get more exposure.  Community interaction is encouraged in the comments of each link, where comments themselves can be “dugg” or “buried” as well.

Shouts were an easy, localized way to share links with your friends.  Now, when someone shares an article with me, I typically get an email saying something to the effect of “Digg is completely retarded and disabled shouts, so I’m sending you this link.  Copying and pasting sucks dick.”  If shouts were an easy, widely used method of distributing content among Digg users, why were they removed?  The Digg blog says:

We’ve listened to your feedback, crunched some user data, and decided to remove shouts. As some of you know, shouts have been a controversial feature since their inception and considering the ever-changing landscape of the social web, we’ve elected to remove them in favor of more popular options. We’ve added easier access to sharing via email, Facebook and Twitter. As always, we want to encourage sharing and communication within our community and will continue to look into features that address these needs.

The feedback and user data their referring to most likely has to do with both spamming and the effect of “power users”.  In the social web space, many have elected to bypass the route of making people “virtual friends” who are actually their friends and instead make everything with a pulse or a processor their friend.  A select few go further as to spend most of their waking hours submitting links to social bookmarking sites in an effort to have a high popular conversion rate for their articles.  We call these people complete losers MrBabyMan power users.

In the perfect storm for a power user, they have a great deal of so-called friends that, upon submitting an article, they will shout the article to, allowing it to gain more exposure.  “Followers” would be a more appropriate term here, but I refuse to give Twitter credit for anything.  Maybe this is spamming, or maybe not since these “victims” willingly became underlings of the spammers.  Regardless, I don’t care.  Don’t befriend people you don’t know on the internet.  If you do, you’re an enabler of creepers.

I’m less interested in the reasons behind shout removal, and more interested in the impact on Digg users.  Everyone on Digg using its features obviously has a Digg account, but not everyone on there has a Facebook or Twitter account.  Even so, if the intent is to prevent spamming, isn’t this just enabling it by proxy?  I don’t need emails notifying me of things that happen among my various internet memberships.  I get on the internet more than once a month.  If I want to know if anybody “poked” me…though I have no idea why I would…I’d log into my Facebook account.  If I want to know what stories my friends dugg, I’d log into Digg.  If I had no life and declared myself a completely pretentious douchebag, I’d log into Twitter to see how many followers I had.

The point is, Digg has taken what was a localized notification service and has forced it to permeate other areas of our internet lives.  Shouts used to take mere seconds and were unobtrusive.  Now, I’m forced to find shared content in between “So and so is pissed at something cause of its stupid dumbness” and “Whatsherfuckingface just posted new photos of something you couldn’t care about unless it involved a motorcycle and the Cretaceous period.”

No shouts?  Buried.