Will Digg’s New Share Feature Pollute Twitter?

Recently, Greg Finn at 10e20.com covered Will Digg Be a Better Place Without Shouts? In the post, Greg announces the news of Digg dropping their shout system, which allowed Digg users to share content with each other, in lieu of a feature that allows users to share content via email, Facebook, and Twitter. So, the main concern now is how Digg content will infiltrate (and pollute) Twitter from this point forward.

Image courtesy of ReadWriteWeb.com

There is already so much noise on Twitter that it becomes difficult to monitor the majority of the conversation without integrated segmentation tools. Twitter can be a great place to find resourceful content and to share links with friends but when does it become too much? The previous shout feature on Digg was already very noisy for users which irritated many Diggers. Many predict those complaints will now become those of Twitter users.

“I’m not big on how they’re [Digg] bringing all the noise to Twitter. I think that’s gonna backfire on Digg and people are going to get so tired of all the people shouting stuff around on Twitter. Many users will unfollow everybody doing it similar to how people reacted negatively to the shouts when those first started.” – Jeff Flowers a.k.a. Bukowsky

Of course there’s always the option of not refusing to pollute Twitter and Facebook with links, or doing so only in moderation. And there’s always the option of unfollowing frequent Digg shouters on Twitter.

“I don’t plan on using Twitter to promote my Digg stories anytime soon. It was easier to monitor shouts because they were coming from mutual friends who I knew submitted good content. On Twitter, I could easily see it just becoming a tidal wave of incoming Digg links that I’d have no way of sifting through.” – Henry Hill a.k.a. BadwithComputer

Digg claims that they removed the shout system because the Digg team “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.” Now the question is: will they listen to the community again? This time the community is much larger because it includes Twitter and Facebook users.

“I think what Digg is doing is not only unfair to the community but also unfair to the Twitter community. Not only is there no way for Digg users to communicate with each other on the site (i.e. sitemail) but now all the spam and junk people were pushing on Digg is going to be pushed via Twitter. You can already see dozens and dozens of stories being “shouted” on Twitter. Similarly now I’m getting dozens of requests a day from people asking to retweet their stories (rather than shout). Same problem, different platform.”  – Muhammad Saleem

However, there are others who had different feelings on the situation.

“I think people were already Twittering Digg links well before the removal of shouts. The good thing about Twitter is that it is a choice who you follow and who you ignore, so each person will learn how much they can flood their stream with crap before they lose followers.

I was actually present when they introduced shouts in testing and told them I thought it was a bad idea as most users would use it to spam their submits. I am happy they removed it as Twitter and Facebook shares do not effect the actual volume of voting on Digg as much as shouts did.” – Brent Csutoras

“For me personally – I don’t really use the shouts that much. It is on a rare occasion and I find that they actually make it harder to get something on the front page. So in that respects – I don’t care too much. I tend to share stuff on Twitter anyways – so that is cool. In the end, I think the shift won’t change much. There will still be diggers who make up the majority of the content and there will still be other folks who are angry about it.”  – David Cohn

With any new change to a social media platform comes complaints. Some social media users will revolt, others will remain indifferent, and the complainers will eventually learn to adapt to the change. But if the majority of people are upset, change can and will modify the current situation.