Is Digg's strength its downfall?
It was only maybe a year ago when I first started looking at Digg.com, a "social bookmarking site" which lets users submit links to articles of interest that then get "dugg" (rated) by others. The idea was that if your story were very interesting, it would get dugg by many other Digg users, and then become more visible by getting on Digg's "front page." This seemed to work well for the most part.
In the last few months, however, there have been numerous controversies possibly due to the increasing popularity of Digg.com. First there was talk about how the top 100 users of Digg submitted more than half of the stories, and so had more influence than the rest of the community who could not spend 10 hours a day submitting stories.
More recently there has been a slew of commentary on how Digg's system for dealing with duplicate entries has been breaking down. This most recent one got to Digg's front page and generated a huge amount of comments.
Personally, I've found the duplication problem getting worse. I used to go to Digg and it would take me a while to get through just the first page of stories, so much so that I often didn't even get to the second page. But more and more, I've been going to the second, third, and fourth pages. Part of this is due to articles on things I'm just not interested in, but a lot is due to repetition.
I've also been trying to submit articles here and there and when I do searches before submitting I sometimes find not one or two, but half a dozen or more articles on the exact same news item. And these weren't even items in the top (and up until recently only) category on Digg, technology.
The problem, I think, lies what gave Digg its initial power - that "social" in "social bookmarking. People are submitting articles so that they are dugg and recognized by others, be they friends or strangers. It's been called "ego" but whatever you call it, it worked well when there were fewer people because the chance that you were creating a dupe was not as high. Now that Digg is so popular, chances are that if a story has only been out for an hour, it's already been submitted. I think this makes some people desperate (since they can't find good articles that haven't been dug) and so they don't search for duplicates and ignore Digg's own warning that their story might be one.
Digg's other tools to prevent duplication don't seem to be working either. One can mark an article as a duplicate, but what isn't clear is how many of such actions it takes for the duplicate to be removed, or if they are removed at all? It must be a lot because we still see many of these. One can comment in the article itself that it's a duplicate, but chances are this won't do anything, other than possibly getting your own comment "dugg down" meaning that your overall rank on Digg goes down.
The problem seems to stem from the idea that people want to be recognized as being special, and that this impulse has superceded the idea of making Digg a better place for the community at large. I think part of this has to do with what's probably a fairly young demographic at Digg, and we all know that when we were young, we tended to think about ourselves a little more than when we got older and realized the world didn't revolve around us. Then again, there are plenty of people for whom age has not meant added wisdom in this area! Anyway, you can be recognized on Digg in at least a couple of different ways. You can do this in a couple of ways on Digg. One is to have a high ranking of diggs; the second is to get a story you submitted onto the front page.
If we agree that the motivation is simply to get recognition, then I think the only way to solve the issue is to remove this recognition. Otherwise, people will always figure out ways to "game" the system, and given a finite number of new things happening every day, and new articles published on the web, people will simply post duplicates hoping that they can some how pump up their ranking and get their submission on the home page by getting their friends to digg it, or creating duplicate accounts, etc. But how do you remove recognition from a social site like Digg.com?
Well, one way to do it is to make the ranking system specific to the person ranking you. So, for example, if I rank X as being digger whose articles I think are reliable and like to read, then I give them a digg, and if I think they are obnoxious, then I "bury" them (give them a negative digg). But my ratings are only for me. They don't get posted anywhere else, save at most on my profile page, but maybe not even there. The point is, that removing the ranking removes one of the purely selfish reasons for people to submit stories. You could also opt to make invisible those stories that have been submitted by users who you've previously buried, and highlight stories of those you've dugg. Or simply have a color-coding scheme to easily pick out the buried users' stories from the dugg users' stories and all the rest. As for users overall ranking, I think Digg could still tally this, but it would only be for their internal use. Possibly, people could see their own rankings, but not those of others.
The second idea is to remove credit to the person who posted a story as soon as it goes on the front page. That way, no one could say - "hey look, my story was posted to the front page, aren't I great? Love me!" However, you could still be dugg or buried by a given user, so your articles might be seen by more or less people depending on how reliable you are.
Whether these suggestions or something else entirely are adopted, I think the problem needs to be addressed by Digg. We are now seeing "duplicates" submissions of articles about duplicates! And this blog entry itself is contributing, of course! Kevin Rose or Jay Adelson, the founders of Digg, need to come out and talk about the issue, be it on Digg, or wherever, or if not talk, then simply do something. The latest news is about how they are in negotiations now to sell Digg, so this issue, even though it seems to be escalating daily, may not be the first thing on their minds! If Digg is sold to a large company like News Corp, or another, the problem may get worse before it gets better. Then again, if we see a massive influx of cash, these guys may have the resources to get their programmers some reinforcements to make some necessary changes.