You know those idiotic commenters on Digg? Sure you do. You know, “FIRST”, “LOLZ”, “URGAY”, etc. Yeah, those guys. Well Digg took a step today that could possibly make them at least 10,000 times more annoying: Email alerts.
Now, let’s be clear: This doesn’t mean that people who post an item on Digg will get alerts every time someone comments — that would be awful. Instead, this means that if you leave a comment on an item, you will get alerted when someone comments on that. And this will occur only for top-level comments and not nested ones.
And while that may not sound so bad, it’s no secret that Digg, like many big sites, has a comment section that is almost completely run by trolls. It takes actions to combat that, such as the burying and promoting of certain comments, but this new email alert system will bypass that.
So if I want to leave an insightful comment on Digg, my inbox is now likely to get overwhelmed by the random garbage comments left in response. Sure, some of them may be thoughtful replies, but in my experience, most will be rubbish. And that’s fine, but just don’t email them to me. But Digg is, by default.
You can turn the email alerts off on this page. Or, perhaps even easier, you could just do what plenty of Digg users do, and not comment.
