Conjecture over the scale of ‘Digg Abuse’ is rife, the theory being that commercial groups (or just gangs of geeks with vested interests) collaborate to drive their story onto the valuable Digg home page. Digg, being decent sorts, have been playing with the rules to beat the cheaters. Their latest ploy is to promote diversity in Digging activity, in the hope that it guarantees genuine, widespread voting. Says Publishing 2.0:

This is astonishing on the face of it — Digg’s struggle with gaming is so extreme that they had no choice but to band certain forms of collaboration in a system that is defined by its collaborative nature.

But the war is not Digg’s (although its iconic stature places it at the epicentre of the row). It’s Google’s, and it’s ours. Offer humanity a platform, and you get all of humanity, the best and the worst. In the space of one day, I went from discussing one thread where users had gathered on mass to defend an editor, to another where a forum exchange featured some of vilest racist abuse I’ve ever read.

The Publishing 2.0 piece concludes that some form of command-and-control is essential if networks are to remain open. I agree.

Today, I had a farewell lunch with a colleague who has spent years moderating one of most incendiary forums out there. Her rule was simple: you’re a pub landlord, and your interests lie with the general good. If someone’s going a little over the top, that’s fine. They care, and caring usually involves red faces and harsh words. But if they’re making life unbearable for the other patrons, then you get heavy in milliseconds.

I don’t know what it says about human nature, but I’ve witnessed extraordinary reactions to her ‘heaviness’ – from resulting attacks on the site to sudden about-turns, where the culprit becomes a fawning apologist.

The police feel no guilt when they make life unbearable for a criminal gang: providers of social platforms shouldn’t need to head for the confessional when they do the same.

In a world of search, social networks and other forms of browsing, portals don’t serve the same function they once did. (See this quick take on Google’s approach to portals.) If you look at the breakdown of the traffic on Yahoo or AOL, you’ll see that by far the largest number of page views is on their e-mail services. The various content sections, news, movies and so on, are still huge but they are losing share of mind to smaller sites.