Kevin Rose has just announced that Digg is scrapping the Top Diggers list.

Some of our top users – the people that have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours finding and digging the best stuff – are being blamed by some outlets as leading efforts to manipulate Digg…After considerable internal debate and discussion with many of those who make up the Top Digger list, we’ve decided to remove the list beginning tomorrow.

It’s clear that Digg is reacting to the reports (here, here, here) that Digg is being gamed in an organized fashion…I guess the thinking is that by taking away this data from the site, Digg will make it harder for people to find the right users who can game the system on their behalf (Top diggers wield a lot of influence in promoting a story to the front page).

The problem though is that I’m not convinced this move will fix the problem. Give the massive traffic implications, how long would it take for somebody to come up with a site/service that tracks top diggers and and publishes the same list outside of Digg? All the data that is needed to come up with the top diggers is public anyway!!! Given that, what would be the benefit of pissing off the top diggers by not recognizing them?