Digg has become the avant-garde of American tech workers. However, there is emerging doubt that an application like Digg can withstand the destructive effects of... popularity.

A would-be Digg might consider granting diminishing voting power to new members along a semilogarithmic scale. This would generate an automated inner cadre of sorts, formalizing what naturally occurs in most organizations online and off. Granting fractional votes to the horde would not be fair, but it would preserve the basic reason why newcomers came to the party in the first place.

But what would the unintended consequences of this be? Would newcomers learn of this and not want to use the aggregate data generated by the community? Would that matter to the original participants?