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Valleywag is reporting on an open letter from top Digg users and their intents to defect to another social media site, due to Digg’s secrecy and lack of transparency.

The letter points out 5 mayor Digg faults:

1) Lack of communication and disregard for the Digg community

2) Unexplained and unacknowledged banning of top users

3) Lack of transparency - Digg only shows you the stories that people have dugg, but not the ones that are buried.

4) The auto-bury list - For months, dozens of sites have been on an auto-bury list, often with no explanation whatsoever.

5) Repeated and flagrant disrespect of its top users

They end the letter with a call to arms:

The collective “WE” built this site from the ground up and while it is sad to leave it, the time has come to move on. We as a loose group of social bookmarkers will find a new community that will allow us to stay in touch and stay informed.

If Digg is a game then we are ready to play for keeps. What happens if the most powerful users in the community decide to leave? Will others join? Is Digg anything without us? Let’s prove it.

This was bound to happen, since Digg is pretty much doing what they please, and have constantly ignored their user base. The big winners in all of this will be sites like Mixx and Reddit. It is understandable that Digg might keep operational secret since they have to deal with a lot of spam, but keeping an open door policy is important to keeping the community transparent.

I believe we are starting to see the beginning of Web 2.5: Social media reaching mass markets and the fight to filter spam while staying open. There is a huge space for efficient junk filtering algorithms in the new generation of social apps. It’s all easy to control when communities are small, but as they grow, so do spammers and unwanted noise. Seeing how Digg will handles this will be very interesting and might define them as a long term company or just a blip in the tech radar.

Remeber Altavista? As the web grew at an exponential rate, Altavista’s results went from impressive to mediocre and thus Google’s success over other search engines(innovative approach for filtering junk and pushing up relevant information with PageRank). Digg has the same challenge, but with the social factor: they have to be very open and deal with a community. It will be very interesting to see how it pans out.

This comes at a tough time for Digg since they are eager to be purchased.

(Via Valleywag.)