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?
KarmaWeb 
I am a big fan of Digg. It’s turned me on to a lot of websites that I may never have found. Part of the motivation of posting great stories was the hope of being on the front page (who doesn’t love the attention?). I was hovering near the 200 mark (I was ranked 203 before they scrapped the ranking system) and was looking forward to getting to the top 100.
Then, in the past few months I stopped posting stories. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the time, but it seemed that every time I posted a great story someone else beat me by hours or even minutes. There are so many folks posting to Digg now that I no longer post stories. I just sit back and read.
Bush is forever saying that democracies do not invade other countries and start wars. Well, he did just that. He invaded Iraq, started a war, and killed people. What do you think? Is killing thousands of innocent civilians okay when you are doing a little government makeover?
If ever there was ever a time in our nation’s history that called for a change, this is it!
The more people that the government puts in jails, the safer we are told to think we are. The real terrorists are wherever they are, but they aren’t living in a country with bars on the windows. We are.