I’m fascinated by the way Digg works, specifically the whole idea of burying article. What are the reasons Diggers bury articles? Well, according to Digg they are:
- Duplicate Story
- Spam
- Wrong topic
- Inaccurate
- OK, this is lame
Let’s take these one at a time:
Duplicate story: Reasonable enough. If the story is a dupe of another recently dugg article then there is cause for it to be buried. Better, though is for Digg admins to verify if a story is duplicate and simply remove it. End of story.
Spam: What’s spam? Is it poorly written? A commercial advertisement? Full of grammatical errors? Let’s define what spam is instead of allowing each digger to define spam as “something I don’t like.”
Wrong topic: Is that really a reason for an article to be buried? How about someone moving it to the right topic. Wrong topic doesn’t mean “not valuable.”
Inaccurate: This is kind of broad. I can write about SEO and be considered inaccurate by five others and highly accurate by ten more. Flag articles as potentially inaccurate, but don’t bury them.
OK, this is lame: Lame? Lame to who? Talk about alienating a large segment of the population. Flagging stories as lame only creates a clique of diggers who only enjoy one kind of story. Digg should want to broaden their audience. What’s lame to one audience is a goldmine to another. Unfortunately, that other audience will never find Digg interesting because the current crop of “news” is lame to them.
So all this got me thinking. If Digg.com was subject the the digging game, would it survive? Vote for yourself: