Revolutions of all sorts tend to have unintended consequences - good and bad. Political revolutions can bring about regime change but also tend to usher along purges, repression and violence. The Industrial Revolution brought higher standards of living to the general population with the trade off of environmental degradation. Globalization has brought with it a raft of benefits in availability and cost of goods but has also contributing to abuses of power, people and political instability around the world. Home Depot has single-handedly spurred a home renovation boom while simultaneously dooming “mom and pop” hardware stores.

Progress happens. The negative unintended consequences of progress are the price to pay for the benefits we reap. Hindsight affords us a clarity of vision that allows for the convenient critique of actions that are past changing and gives us the false sense that the negative consequences of progress were ignored, or more conspiratorially, weren’t so unintended.

All that to say this: Digg.com and its ilk are leading us down a road to profoundly negative unintended consequences. I say this now so that in ten years, when my warnings weren’t heeded and the Internet is a smoking ruin, it won’t be such a surprise that this has happened (and I’ll be able to say I told you so).

Digg is to the Internet as Cosmopolitan is to the magazine industry - it is a channel for low value content to be fed to the masses. Digg is to the Internet as Walmart is to the retail industry - it is a channel for low worth content to be fed to the masses.

I’m taking a pretty hard line here, but I’m convinced that Digg sets a very dangerous benchmark. Note that I’m not saying that the idea of a social news site is bad - what I’m pointing out is that by being the mass-market publisher of the Internet, Digg is becoming what so many of us revile: a corporate behemoth, a controlling force, a hegemony that squeezes smaller and better offerings into the shadows.

And make no mistake - the Digg effect on the Internet will be the equivalent of Home Depot forcing smaller stores to close up shop. Small sites dealing in specialty content will find it harder and harder to increase readership because the content they produce won’t be mass-market friendly, thus no exposure on Digg. The inability of small sites to get their quality content onto the front page of Digg will mean that a large portion of the Internet population won’t be able to find real quality content (thanks also to Google in this case).

There is a way out of this. If social news is what the public wants, social news is what they should be given - but I’d like to suggest that social news site software needs to become a turn-key solution much like Wordpress is turn-key for blogging. This will lead to a profusion of social news sites with specialized focus and audiences and will blunt the power of Digg. Instead of relying on Digg’s over-generalized taxonomy of content, smaller offerings can become much more focused and specific, catering to knowledgeable communities of interest, relying on the discernment of those communities and ultimately raising the overall quality of the offerings.

In short, I’m suggesting that the software underpinnings of social news sites should be open-source and freely available. Open algorithms will allow for fine tuning, quality control and should help fighting “gaming”. Easy publishing will mean that catering to specific interests should require only the most basic skills, increasing accessibility.

Digg won’t go away in such an environment, but other and more focused resources will rise up to serve specific demographics that aren’t being well served now. Consider the following example as a demonstration of the benefit that could arise from what I am suggesting:

Aviation Week and Space Technology (AWST) is a magazine with a circulation of just over 100,000. It is sometimes referred to as “aviation leak” because it breaks so many stories in the aviation and space industries. It’s small readership comprises a generally affluent and knowledgeable demographic and so enables AWST to be profitable with prime advertisers and steady subscription rates. In this example AWST represents the specialized interests of a small and focused website.

Popular Mechanics boasts more than 10 times the readership of AWST. It covers aviation and pretty much everything else. The level of the coverage in the magazine is very shallow, leading to little real understanding of what is being discussed and requiring little competence from the reader. In this example, PM represents Digg.

Suffice it to say, I want to see more Aviation Week and less Popular Mechanics in our future. Do you?