Yesterday, on Digg the Blog, Digg founder Kevin Rose announced the next Townhall, scheduled for Monday, May 12th at 8 PM EDT/5 PM PDT. Like the last one (our coverage), this Townhall will also be a virtual meeting held as a live webcast and made available for download afterwards.
The last Townhall, held back in February, was the first of its kind. At that meeting CEO Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose addressed some questions and criticisms about the Digg web site and discussed upcoming features. Some of the topics included in that session were whether or not they have a group of secret moderators (they don’t), whether there are “bury bots” or a “bury brigade” (there isn’t), how they fighting gaming of the system, and changes to the “search” functionality, among other things.
What Should They Cover?
This time, Digg is again calling for your input, asking you to let them know what topics you’re interested in by posting, digging, or burying comments on this thread.
As Richard mentioned earlier this morning, here at ReadWriteWeb, we’ve been concerned with many of Digg’s problems for some time, specifically favoritism of certain publishers, manually taking power away from power users, manipulating the topics, issues with gaming, charges of censorship, the endless barrage of sensationalism, repetitive lists, and Kevin Rose stories on the frontpage. So, needless to say, we’re very excited to see that some topics near and dear to our heart are currently at the top of the list of topics for the upcoming Townhall.
In fact, as it stands right now, a comment about the decline of tech stories on Digg is the number one comment with 146 diggs. We covered that subject back in April, when we released some exclusive graphs created just for us by Richard Cunningham, who utilized the Digg API. Clearly that’s a topic important to the Digg community – our story was dugg 2225 times.
Other comments on the Townhall topic suggestion thread include the decline of quality stories in general, biased political coverage, Digg forums, word-based blocking, exposing buries (again!), and other feature suggestions for the site.
The Digg blog post also mentioned the upcoming changes to the comments system, a story that broke on Twitter, when Kevin accidentally (?) posted a link to a video about the new comments system and then quickly took it down.
What topics do you want to see discussed at the next Digg Townhall?
