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• Digg
• Bury

Do you really want to know how to make Digg better? The most important thing you can do is bring Digg back to its roots. By that I mean you need to find some way to make the users feel like they have more control over the system. What made Digg so great back in the day was the fact that anybody could find something cool and original and post it and if it was cool and interesting enough the submission would make it to the front page. The first nail in Digg's coffin was when Kevin Rose allowed the power users to pretty much run the site.

I think the problem was Kevin Rose thought we were upset because we could submit a story and it had virtually no chance of making it to the front page but a power user like MrBabyMan could steal our submission and submit it an hour later and it would hit the front page. Maybe he was thinking that it wasn't that big of a deal because if the content is good it will make it to the front page somehow, and who really cares who gets the credit. Its not that big of a deal right? Wrong! It was a big deal because that meant I could find something really cool and really interesting and submit it and it wouldn't make it to the front page unless some power user stumbled upon it and submitted it. So now most of us average users that are really trying to make this site better by submitting good content have no way of doing so. On top of that, because of the control the power users had, they could submit anything and it would make it to the front page. And they did, they submitted dupe after dupe and literally any crappy picture from 4chan, along with some cool and interesting submissions too. But they had control over the front page, and they didn't care about making the site better. All they cared about was getting as many front page submissions as possible. Well this pissed many diggers off, and this is about the time the original digg users started migrating over to reddit. It only got worse once Kevin Rose implemented the friend system and shouts, etc. It only made it easier for power users to control the front page.

So in a nutshell, you need to give the power back to the users. You need to give them an incentive to submit stories and vote on stories. I even stopped digging and burying after a while because I felt like my vote didn't count. Once that happened, Digg kind of lost its appeal. But I still needed a place to find cool news and I wasn't really fond of reddit so I still came to Digg all the time. Then v4 came out, and I am sure even most digg staffers know deep down that v4 was complete and utter crap when it came out, and that drove a lot of the users that were just like me over to reddit. And once we got used to reddit, and installed a skin so it didn't make our eyes bleed, etc. we found that reddit is actually really cool. It has a great community with a plethora of interesting content and really great discussions and so on. A good chunk of those users are probably never coming back. I myself found a home at reddit, but if you guys can really change this place for the better I would be interested in visiting both sites. And I am sure I am not alone on this either.

But you guys have a long ways to go. I would say focus on the algorithm so everybody has an equal chance and the RSS submissions are kind of lame as well. Again, it takes away from the appeal of Digg. One last bit of advice, I would try to be as transparent and straight-forward as possible to your users. You want your users to completely trust the Digg staff and these last few weeks you guys have made that hard. You have done some things that seemed rather unscrupulous and quite frankly when the staff was called out on it, they gave vague explanations that didn't address the actual concerns and only made you guys seem more culpable. Like those "test" accounts that were caught gaming the system. Weren't there like a hundred of them? And they were digging so many stories on such a consistent basis along with the fact that they were deleted immediately after it was brought to the staff's attention, almost as if to cover it up. And then Kevin said something like "those were just test accounts" without answering any of the real questions we had. (some of them I just presented). Please guys, for your own sake even, don't do that s**t. Your users are going to be more supportive and more likely to do things like turn off ad-block for Digg if you can establish some kind of mutual respect between the staff and the users.

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