There was an interesting article posted on TechCrunch yesterday about how Digg Refuges May Be Heading to Mixx. The argument is based on the following claim, though quite honestly I have no idea whether it’s true or not (but for now, I am just assuming that it is):

Digg users, including top contributors, are showing an increasing amount of frustration with the Digg community, and many are leaving. Conspiracy theories that Digg auto buries stories with certain topics or linking to certain sites only compounds the problem.

Some users eventually go to Reddit, Propeller, or any of a number of other Digg-like sites. But a disproportionate amount of them seem to be heading to Mixx, and writing about their choice.

What makes this interesting is that Digg has been so popular, and the voting and reputation system, by design, has the benefit of network effects built into it – and if you just copy what they’ve done, it seems nonsensical that a whole bunch of people would move over en masse. But if you check out the Mixx site (or any of the other jillions of replicas), it appears that’s exactly what they have done, and they haven’t even really done it that well.

However, there appears to be a possibility that there’s an aspect of these network effects that might be negative to Digg – the number of jerks and idiots increasing rapidly and feeding off of each other, who may well post and respond more often than others, and collectively ruin the experience for others.

This idea comes from the comment made by Vanderlay Design in the article (no, it’s probably not his or her real name, though it may have a tie to that famous architect of the same name… you know, the one who would say that Digg is turning into a Jerk store):

“Unlike 99% of the other Digg clones, I think Mixx has a real chance for success…Mixx has a much more positive audience than Digg. It always amazes me that even the most popular and highest quality articles can get so many negative and unnecessarily degrading comments on Digg. So far the users of Mixx have proven to be quite a bit more pleasant, something that I know will be welcomed by most users.”

So why am I posting this if I have no idea if any of it’s true? Because I’m drunk, that’s why. Just kidding – it seems there’s a very interesting question in here about how big these sites can get without hitting some serious snags, and whether the positive benefits first movers should get from network effects might be counterbalanced by the entire jerk store moving in en masse.

But if you won’t take Vanderlay Design’s word for it, let’s pop over to see what Revital Salomon is saying, who self-proclaims that he lives on the net 24/7. He’s got an interesting post on Why Digg is Neither Relevent Nor Useful, and there are two compelling reasons he gives that tie to the issue at hand: # 3 (internal politics), and #6 (angry mobs). To quote the latter:

The general atmosphere is the comments section of digg can get really scary. People are downright violent sometimes, and users are getting viciously attacked just for stating an unpopular opinion. Sure, there are trolls everywhere, but in digg they really reign supreme. Not to mention comment burying: it’s not that rating is a bad thing – it’s because people just can’t help themselves. Put a civilized man behind a keyboard and give him anonymity – and you get an evil, stupid monster.

Again, I haven’t done formal research on this particular topic, and the fact I found this post might be biased itself (the slam on Digg is ranked #5 on Mixx, natch), but there’s enough anecdotal stuff floating around to make me curious, particularly given the Digg page views chart from the last year looks like this:

So what’s going on? If you, um, dig Digg, are you growing tired of it? Can natural network effects get overwhelmed? Are niche offerings going to overwhelm mass market ones? Perhaps most importantly, can Digg do something to (if you believe the hypothesis) weed out the jerks and rein in the mob, without ruining the democratic nature of the site?