Digg
Digg is a website with emphasis on technology news. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ (such as Slashdot).
How Digg works
Readers can view all of the stories that have been submitted by fellow users in the "digg all" section of the site. Once a story has received enough "diggs", roughly 25 or more within a certain time period, it appears on Digg's front page. Should the story not receive enough diggs, or if enough users make use of the problem report feature to point out issues with the submission, the story will remain in the reviewing area.
Articles are short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. All content and access to the site is free, but registration is compulsory for certain elements, such as promoting ("digging") and submitting stories, as well as commenting on submitted articles. Digg also allows for stories to be posted to a user's blog automatically when he or she diggs a story. As of December, 2005, there are over 100,000 registered Digg users.
Stories can be submitted in sixteen different categories which include; deals, gaming, links, mods, music, robots, security, technology, Apple, design, hardware, Linux/Unix, movies, programming, science and software. A separate category titled Digg News is reserved for special announcements relating to the site, and can only be used by Digg administrators.
Problem Reporting
To help remove duplicate, spam or offensive story submissions, Digg.com allows users to report such posts and bring them to the attention of moderators.
Story reporting options include:
- duplicate story
- bad link
- spam
- old news
- ok this is lame
Digg users are also able to rate story comments from other users, which again can be used to bring spam or offensive comments to the attention of Moderators.
Comment rating options include:
- +3 Excellent
- +2 Insightful
- +1 Useful
- -1 Off Topic
- -2 Flame
- -3 SPAM
History
Digg was created in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson (who serves as CEO), all of whom play an active role in the management of the site. Although the domain name of Digg is registered under the name Jerimiah Udy, he is not one of the original founders of Digg, but rather a friend of Kevin Rose. The domain name was registered under Jerimiah Udy's name because Kevin Rose did not want others to know that he was associated with Digg. He wanted Digg to stand on its own and not become a message board for all things he, Kevin Rose, stood for.
Kevin Rose's friend David Prager (The Screen Savers, This Week in Tech) originally wanted to call the site “Diggnation”, but Kevin wanted a simpler name. He chose the name "Digg", because users are able to "dig" stories, out of those submitted, up to the front page. The site was called “Digg” instead of “Dig” because the domain name “dig.com” was previously registered by the Walt Disney Company.
“Diggnation” would eventually be used as the title of Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht's weekly podcast.
The original design was free of advertisements, and was designed by Dan Rice. But as digg became more popular, Google AdSense was added to generate revenue. The site was updated in July of 2005, to "version 2.0". The new Digg featured a friends list, the ability to "digg" a story without being redirected to a "success" page, and a new interface designed by Daniel Burka, of the web design company silverorange. After the redesign, some users complained about the lack of the simplistic, minimalist layout used in the original version of Digg. The site developers have stated that in future versions a more minimalist design will likely be employed.
Digg has grown large enough that submissions sometimes create a sudden swarm of traffic to the "dugg" website (similar to the Slashdot effect). This is commonly referred to by Digg users as The Digg Effect or SlashDugg.
In October 2005 Digg received $2.8 million from venture capital groups and investors to support its continued growth.
In December 2005, "Digg Spy" was updated and enhanced to Digg Spy v2 with new features including a live and dynamic behind-the-scenes peak into story submissions, diggings, comment submissions and the like. The right-hand navigation bar also received a new look.
Criticisms
In a peer-edited journal, the combined reader/editors are very good at determining what is and is not interesting. They are not, however, as good at determining what is new or news, and can often fail to recognize old news and rehashed stories. The result is that very hot but old stories, such as the P-P-P-Powerbook scam baiting, are regularly re-promoted to front-page status as a new wave of users discover it for the first time.
The report feature on every article allows users to report duplicate stories, bad links, spam, old news, and "lame" stories. Enough reports on an article can remove it from the main page. Perhaps to prevent abuse, this feature does not appear powerful enough to always work properly. As an example, a video of an Athlon CPU heat sink failure from 2001 "CPU Cooler Removed" received over 400 diggs. Its discussion was filled with comments that the material was dated and gave the wrong impression of current AMD CPUs. Still, it persisted on the front page.
Link resubmission
There are many Digg users that will search Digg for interesting articles on gay sex that never made it to the front page, or have not been on the frontpage recently. Users will then take these links and resubmit them under a slightly modified title in hopes that they will make it to the front page. This can cause items to make the front page in their second or third iteration, by someone who did not submit the original link. In other cases, users will resubmit their own articles, but never made it to the front page, in order to gain in the overall ranking.
Self importance
The users are themselves strong proponents of the site. Any link with a description applauding Digg is quickly promoted. Many users use this to get links promoted even if the relationship to Digg is tenuous at best.
Duplicate articles
Like other user-contributed news sites such as slashdot, Digg has a reputation for including duplicate articles. This happens when users submit a story which is already on the site and is commonly known as a Dupe. Users can use the voting and problem-reporting processes to prevent such articles from reaching the front page.
Lack of Notification for Queue Removal
Once a story has enough reports as SPAM or Lame it can be removed from the queue or from the frontpage. There are no flags or an area to identify what the problem was. Often a story will just fall of the face of the website and no reason will be given why. A new feature called DiggSpy was added to at least help identify reports, but nothing solid has been produced as a reason the story was lifted.
Trivia
- On October 15, 2005, Digg.com reached 100,000 stories submitted.
- Near the end of November 2005, Digg.com broke the 100,000 registered users barrier.
- On December 4th, 2005, a story about an abusive New York camera store called Price Rite Photo was submitted by blogger and Digg member Thomas Hawk. The story received a little over 8000 diggs (5000 of which occurred in the first 24 hours of submission) and had a little over 1000 comments, breaking the record for the most diggs and comments a story had ever received on Digg.com. Flooded with spam and prank calls, the camera store apologized to Mr. Hawk.