Lately I have been spending a lot of time over at digg.com. For those who don’t know, this site is that puts its users in charge of the news. Stories are submitted to digg by members, and then those same members give a “digg” if they like the story. Stories with more diggs rise to the top and those that lack diggs quickly sink to the bottom.
Tonight it seems as though more stories are being posted about the way digg works as far as the system itself, the management, and the members in general. I seemed more than apparent that digg has become a full fledged community similar to slashdot and fark, and even places like some of the larger web design forums I am a member of. So, I thought I would site down and see what I can contribute to the digg community by writing up a list of my own suggestions for the future of digg.
1. Become more of a community
First things first, I think that digg would benefit from getting a more community feel. Now users are encouraged to interact with each other, but they are not really allowed to mesh. How about a forum that exists right alongside the site? How about something that really pushes the envelope like a digg chat that is implanted right into the site? Having mentioned those two things I think it is also important that users be allowed to choose their level of involvement. If they want to be part of a digg forum, they can or they can avoid entirely. It shouldn’t be something that is shoved in the users face.
2. Overhaul the manner in which stories sink and float
To me it seems that there are two ways to “catch” a story. Either look for it on the main page, or in the digg for stories section. Sure you can go through each individual category, but you are still mainly going to be attracted to the top of the page where all of the top rated stories are. So what ends up happening is that you catch stories at the top, or at the very bottom. In the middle of all this, some good stories can be lost. I think that possibly some kind of color or icon system needs to be developed to better group stories in into more user approved categories. Right now it seems to be 1000+ diggs or 3 diggs, with more groups stories that would otherwise be buried can be saved from drowning.
3. Expand to a wider audience.
Digg claims to be a tech news site, although I think it is inevitable that they expand to all news. I mean, they basically are right now. Members are beginning to gripe more and more with “How is this a tech story”, “Not tech”, and “Digg = tech”. They are doing this because some stories have no category on digg, and have to be posted in cat orgies that they don’t fit into.
4. Get some moderators
This is for two reasons, and can happen two ways. The first is that there are possibly ways to exploit digg, such as bots that are auto-digging stories. This makes them rise quicker, and thus defeating the purpose of a user driven news site. Some people need to be on the lookout for this. I don’t think that Kevin Rose can do it on his own. The second reason is that some of the comments I have seen are a little obscene, and I consider myself adept in the arts of obscenity. I realize that they can be buried, but in some cases they need to be removed. How can digg appoint moderators? The first way would be to just pick some people, pin a badge them, and turn them loose in the wild-west of digg. This is just the way a forum works. The other more user oriented approach is mentioned below.
5. User Levels
Users love to feel like belong to something, and have for a long time. Why not reward these users with something that shows that they are tried and true members of the digg community? Nothing big, maybe their user name gets bolded after they submit a certain number of stories that make it to the front page, or they get a star for digging a certain number of articles. Also as I mentioned above, users that are more established could help police the community. Let’s say a level 1 user marks a story as spam - nothing happens. But, when a level 5 user marks a story as spam it is removed immediately.
Leave a Reply