NICK DOUGLAS — Digg grew from a tight community of power web users and fans of founder (and former Tech TV star) Kevin Rose. Now it's a popular destination that sends hundreds of thousands of users to dozens of sites a day. As Digg's role on the Internet has changed, Rose and his team have had to adapt how the site works. But some changes seem counterintuitive. What does it mean that this week, the site stopped honoring its "Top Diggers"?

Rose announced on Digg's blog Thursday that he would pull the site's "Top Diggers" list, immediately setting off a wave of commentary. TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington noted that seven of Rose's nine paragraphs discussed fighting spam and system-gaming on Digg.

Gaming the system, wherein a user diggs an article with fake accounts, paid users, or a tit-for-tat cabal, has been the site's most public headache. More pernicious for a social site than problems like downtime, a surly userbase, or even mediocre content, it violates the spirit of a community site. Rose calls it "a normal dynamic of a growing site," and he's right: Google, for instance, recently fixed its search system to curb the practice of "googlebombing" with phrases like "miserable failure." Google said that the practice seemed harmless until the public started thinking that the company had colluded in these gamed search results. Similarly, Rose was accused of taking part in gaming his own site (an illogical accusation that he denied). Still, Rose says that Digg has done well keeping its top feed pure through users who "bury" bad stories and algorithms that keep fake diggs from pushing items to the front page.

Digg killed the Top Diggers list to kill spam. Presumably, the companies and organizations that try to game Digg first seek out top users. They seem like power users willing to make some cash or favors by spending more time on their favorite site. But Rose cites a slightly different reason: he says that Digg's top users have been blamed for gaming the site, and he made this move to protect them.

Of course, these users add a lot of value to his site. Killing their most public bragging-rights list kills some of the glory of being a top Digger. Can the site afford to risk alienating those users? Well, yes.

Digg is big. Alexa.com has ranked the site among the top 100 traffic-getters since last October. Even accounting for systemic bias, that puts Digg around the 10s-of-millions-a-day range. Digg is on track to top one million registered users in a few months. At this scale, the most valuable users aren't the ones who submit the most to the site. Normal algorithm changes at Digg have already lessened their impact. Instead, the site most values users who anticipate hot stories and users who submit unique content.

Rose promises Digg will soon release new features to help users find good content and to honor good users (the twin goals of the Top Diggers list). Expect these to include custom recommendation lists, where a user can see similar users (sort of like Amazon's recommendation system, if it recommended a shopper instead of a product). Digg could even launch custom homepages as on the smaller social news site Reddit, which gives users a page of recommended stories (based not on content but on who else liked a story. It's a smarter way than topical categories to optimize the story list for any given user.

And what of the top users? Well, Rose says that Digg staff discussed the change with some of them. Digg user #10 says that while some other top users may leave the site, he won't. Besides, the real glory hogs can still point to the top Digger list run by an outside blogger (who works for Digg competitor Netscape but says he did this on his own time). Netscape founder Jason Calacanis, who tried to lure away top Digg users by offering them money to contribute to Netscape, criticizes the deal but misses the point. Ever hear of a "top Yahoo user" or a "top Google contributor"? Ever wanted to meet the top Amazon buyer or most active NYTimes.com reader? Nope. At the biggest sites on the web, it's not about the top users. It's about all of them.