A few ways to improve digg

digg has been getting a lot of flack recently. Their user ship has gone down and they are taking a bashing in the social networking community. Recently, they made a change to their algorithm, hoping that would suddenly spark a change in the way users interacted in the site, and give an opportunity for smaller stories to rise to the top. Judging by the way the community has reacted, that change has done nothing good. I've been thinking a lot about digg and how to make it work a little better. The changes would be radical, but I think meaningful. Here are the ideas from my very small brain.

1. Limit the number of friends to say 200.

2. Give a time limit on friendship requests. If say after a week the person hasn't reciprocated, they don't want to be your friend. Take the hint.

3. Get rid of shouts. Sure they're great for telling your friends, but they also enable spammers.

4. Limit the number of posts. I was on digg a few days ago and one spammer had 22 posts in the span of ten minutes, all from his site. Reduce it to something like 2 every 24 hours for new users and slowly climb upwards as you gain a reputation, but never make it limitless.

5. Limit the amount of diggs and buries you can make. Doing this will minimize the impact of digg and bury brigades. Say 10 diggs and 5 buries every 24 hours.

6. Put a tag on users who are there to promote their own stuff. Make it clear to the community what they are there to do. Just because someone wants to promote their own site doesn't mean the stuff isn't worthwhile. If they go nowhere with it, they'll stop posting. If it's good, then it deserves to be seen.

7. Allow unburies. Create a section for buried stories and allow people to digg them. Some stories I've posted have ended up with more diggs (via the original site or my profile) after they've been buried than they had before. Give stories the opportunity to come back.

These are just a few of my ideas. I really think digg and other sites like it are great for the community both dedicated and casual, but as the leader, digg needs to set the standard. Right now, changing an algorithm isn't going to do that.

Everyone get's duped by "fake" news story

The last two days I've been reading this story Walmart to cover up "M" rated games. The reason I've been reading about it for two days is because the story seems to have popped up on almost every gaming site on the web. Here's the link to the original story:

http://scrapetv.com/Games/Games%20Pages/News/
walmart%20to%20cover%20up.html

When I first read the story I was pissed and amused. After looking a little deeper though, I realized the story wasn't true. It's pretty obvious the site it came from was satirical in nature. But the story kept popping up everywhere, particularly on digg. Legit sites were picking it up, including Game Daily:

http://news.filefront.com/wal-mart-covering-up-m-rated-games/

Strange. It makes me wonder about the state of web journalism and the need for both websites and readers to look at things a little more critically. I emailed Scrape TV and they don't seem to know what happened. Their response: "It looks like someone found the story and posted it on N4G. It does seem to have gotten out of hand."

Agreed.

With, currently, 1250+ diggs from a high end site like Game Daily, it certainly seems to have gotten out of hand. Frankly I find the whole thing funny, but it does shake my confidence, just a little bit, in the state of internet journalism.

Of course, I'm not going to stop reading.