Digg was founded on the premise that Slashdot is a great site but it could be potentially much more interesting if the wisdom of the crowds was used to pick the top stories rather than a handful of editors. The idea proved to be in many ways correct as Digg eventually passed Slashdot as the go-to place for tech news. Now it appears we're coming full circle with Slashdot's founder today in the New York Times questioning whether the wisdom of the crowds is really a good idea in picking news items.

Slashdot's founder Rob Malda was making these comments in response to the flair up that took place last week in which some of Digg's top users were upset over algorithm changes that seemed to try and de-emphasize their influence on the site. Malda's point is that for crowd wisdom to really work as intended there needs to be an emphasis on the majority rather than the vocal minority. In many ways it would seem Digg agrees with that, hence the algo change, but as Malda points out, that can quite often make those very vocal users upset.

A better example that Malda points to is the proliferation of Ron Paul stories on Digg and other social news sites. While Ron Paul no doubt has a nice-sized Internet following, the frequency with which stories about him hit the frontpage of Digg is ridiculous. It's pretty clear that a group of Paul fanatics have successfully manipulated the wisdom of the crowds to their advantage to the point that it has driven someone like me away from visiting Digg too often because it's completely cluttered with Ron Paul propaganda. Obviously if editors were running Digg, this would not be the case is Malda's point.

But what Malda fails to mention is all of the great stories on Digg that an editor may miss or for whatever reason pass up on. An editor is still just one person looking at a story and making a determination. Maybe they don't think a story is interesting or worthy, but maybe 100 other people out there do and thus the power of a site like Digg where this stories comes to life.

The point is, that despite both Slashdot's and Digg's belief that their way is better, both ways have pluses and minuses. This is exactly why a site like Slashdot will never be completely killed by Digg and vice versa.