Richard MacManus writes about one of his frustrations with Digg - poorly created links that don’t give do a story justice. Once a particular link is added to Digg, there is no way for the submitter or anyone else to edit and improve it.
Sometimes this is done negligently or in a desire to post first; sometimes it is done maliciously to effectively block a story on Digg. Either way, it is an increasingly annoying problem for Digg users, and one that should be addressed. Too often, Digg’s data is crap.
Richard suggests giving some or all users the ability to edit links. He says he’s calling for editors, but not to pick stories. Rather, just to clean up existing stories to make them more accurate.
I like the idea a lot, and it’s something I’ve seen with a few other startups. Thoof, for example, which we wrote about last month, allows users to change any story in a wiki-like fashion. Changes are then voted on by the community to see if they stick or not.
Whether its power users, hired editors or the community at large, something should be done to fix the incentives for people to submit bad data to Digg. Good idea. Richard.
They have other things to worry about on digg. Like fixing the stupid comment system.
Unfortunately, this is only one of Digg’s many flaws. My recent analysis of Digg reveals that it doesn’t meet three of the four criteria James Surowiecki believes need to be present to create and harness a wise crowd. Richard’s suggestion seems to be a good one, but I’d argue that Digg has a number of even more significant problems that prevent it from being an example of how the “wisdom of the crowd” can be implemented in an online environment.
http://www.drama20show.com/200.....wd-part-i/
Rather than having editors why not have a Digg-system for summaries? People write a summary of a post and other users vote on the best one.
I think they have a much bigger problem in that most of their audience doesn’t take the time to read upcomming stories, and just diggs stories that have already made the homepage.
Since day 1, we’ve been very up front at DZone (http://www.dzone.com) about the use of editors to keep the flow of content clean. This has worked incredibly well to help keep the content focused on developers and in most cases keeps the signal to noise ratio very high. This has paid off lately, as DZone is now one of the premier places to go for developer content and is making moves as one of the top social bookmarking sites in general by some measures.
Thoof is a much better alternative presently
Digg is inherently designed for this type of problem. If it’s going to truly be a user-controlled environment, things like this are always going to exist. 95% of the people out there don’t care enough to fix this sort of issue.
My biggest problem with Digg, with regards to the feedback (Digging a story) relates to the way I read the site.
I scroll through the site, opening interesting links in new tabs as I go. After I’m done scraping Digg, I go and read everything I’ve opened. It would take a fair amount of effort to go back through Digg and find the links I liked to be able to Digg them.
It’d be nice to at least have an option to have Digg links open in some kind of framed page, where you’d still be able to Digg it after reading it. (Similar to the way Google images opens with a banner header)
I think it’s a great idea. I mean, I’ve seen stories on digg that say so-and-so “is a pimp!” referring to a powerful politician. I’ve seen hugely popular stories contain bad grammar and misinformation. Sometimes stories turn out to be false, but still remain in the system - which doesn’t help discover truth.
I’ve also seen the same story on the same URL submitted multiple times. Sometimes months go by and the same story and make it to the frontpage again.
Digg isn’t clean. It’s a mess. Why not edit Digg to clean it up?
I agree…
But one of the big problem I see within the Digg system is that users don’t objectively weigh the story - instead, they are biased by the user who posts it.
I’ve seen too many times where a story gets slammed because of the user who posted it it. In reality, I find some of the most interesting stories are the ones who have a loud outcrying of h8t3r5. If a story has 3,000 people bitching about how much it sucks, then I want to see just how much it sucks.
If you “fix” Digg, at least in a way that it considerably changes they way it works (and Richard’s suggestion does), you’ll “break” Digg.
Same goes for “fixing” many of those other “flaws”.
Think about that for a minute.
We use experts to provide only relevant links to a search term. The experts submit their links to our editors for final fact-checking and then the links are released.
RAUL LOPEZ
tengee.com
I had never even thought of posting a story first to ‘block’ it. Diggers should try and route out these people and shame them publicly.
This problem has been identified, addressed, and solved.
Just use Thoof!
Thoof is awesome, but it is in a different (although related) catergory than Digg. Digg is more of an place for dicussing popular news stories, but Thoof is designed to deliver news related to a persons intrests. It has no commenting system.
It would not supprize me if Google is eyeing these companies. Organizing the news fits well into Google mission of “organizing the world’s information”.
This is exactly one of the reasons I stopped using digg for the most part. Democracy may be fine for deciding what’s popular, but man, the writers SUCK!
The idea of “editing” how people write up articles submitted to Digg is censorship, and is a total contradiction to what “social”, “people powered” websites are about.
When I submit a story I have every right to add whatever to the description - it my opinion.
Don’t like it? Submit it to Technorati yourself. kthxbai
Plime.com is another social news portal has an interesting wiki system, where users are able to edit other people’s news posts based on rank.
People who use Digg enjoy the way it is currently setup (for the most part…). Stories with poor grammar make it to the front page on a regular basis. Most people see it as an obvious error and only a handful of people complain. I honestly don’t want stories to be approved beforehand, if that is something you enjoy… then please move on to another site. Digg is something much different then that.
The comment system is the best part (sans new system, yuck). The ability to interact with others for the span of less than an hour is great. Who cares what the story is about? Most people on Digg never even visit the story which is a running joke on Digg. We like the comments.
We live by titles and descriptions.
@Luca #2 - it might get a bit messy but I agree with your idea as the only democratic solution.
I actually joined Digg last week just to post a story about last.fm who had pissed alot of people off by not participating in the day of silence, only to find that those stories were being - in my opinion - systematically posted in such a way as to bury it on Digg. Pretty smart PR move if you ask me- So yeah! It’s a problem! (i probably shouldn’t have warned them about the digg effect on their blog though)
How has nobody complained that “real” news doesn’t ever make it to the Digg homepage. The only news is to do with tech startups, iPods and the top 10984 reasons why Digg is full of rubbish stories…
IMHO people always miss the point about Digg.
Digg is a community. A VERY big one, and with tons of people disconnected from each other, but a community nonetheless.
It is not the holy grial of anything. It does not need to be. All these “problems” people keep flagging are for the most part raised by people who really aren’t part of that community, or that haven’t tried hard enough.
Digg is a community. Think of it that way and perhaps you will stop trying to “fix” it. I have never read a company in need of more “fixes” than Digg in my life! Yet it contiues to thrive.
Sure, it may have its own issues in terms of monetization, but people aren’t trying to “fix” that. They’re trying to fix how the community works. And people flag the fact that Digg has a hard time getting out of that “young, male, tech” audience. Well, welcome to some of the factors that build a community.
If you really want to “fix” Digg, start by understanding what is today and why it DOES work, then go from there. It’s really not that hard, but fixing the mechanichs to your liking won’t “fix” Digg.
MySpace is a mess. Why don’t we go and “fix” that?
Editors? We call that Slashdot…
Get a dugg story /
- then have a bot search for the story - from trusted sites (meaning news sites etc… with certain credentials) …
- don’t allow copy and pasting unto a adwords page / this will eliminate - motivation for - “being first” ….etc…
- if the site adds adwords later; just change the link - to the first known real site with that content.