digg

I was talking with the friend who got me onto Digg two years ago now. We've both admitted our digg use has declined.
When we discussed why, we both came to the conclusion that useful information has been pushed aside in favor of whatever the mob wants.
Exhibit A:
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/What_I_hate_abou ...

That digg article got buried for being inaccurate, but it is not inaccurate at all. Diggers do have biases, and the main page, and all the main topic sub-pages suffer for it. Science is rarely about science, and 80% of the time it is greenies pushing their agendas and beliefs. Sometimes I even see religious articles under the guise of "well, it's about evolution, so that's sciency". Last week there was a pravda.ru url that got 300+ diggs in the science section for an article claiming that vampires are real. It's become a joke.

The main page is worse. There are so many fans for Obama and Ron Paul on Digg that you have to wonder if digg itself hasn't been completely hijacked by activists for particular sides. Most of the time the main front page is all about Obama. I myself don't mind hearing about the man, but Digg use to have easily-accessible-information that was useful to me. Now it's all about what political cause is most represented here.

Is anything going to be done to finally obliterate the mob-mentality that seems to have risen to completely dominate digg?

I may be mistaken... but If I remember correctly, wasn't there supposed to be an *Official* Digg Forum in the works?

A place where diggers can openly communicate with each other & digg moderators without having to troll through ton's & ton's of spam shouts. When is this going to be launched?

The decline of tech related stories that hit the front page. One thing that I would LOVE to see is a site filter. Meaning, if an article is from xyzsite.com, you can block it from your view completely. I've seen enough Huffington Post stories for a lifetime.

The upcoming section needs help. I'm not sure what it needs but browsing it is slowly becoming more and more overwhelming. If i browse by most popular I have to go through about 20 pages of stuff before i get to articles with 30 or 20 some diggs. Which i think makes the upcoming section more dependent on large friends networks which makes it harder for users with small friends list to get past 20 diggs and for it to get seen by people who don't have you befriended.

I would love a link at the top or bottom of each comment that will take me to the parent comment. In long threads, it can be hard/annoying to follow the line at the left hand side of the comment back up to its parent. It's a minor thing, but from time to time it would have made my experience on digg a little more pleasant.

Any chance that we can get some word-based blocking by which I mean that you can go to your settings and set certain words that you do not want to see stories about. An example of this use would be if you wanted to block all stories tagged "NSFW" or "(some politician)".

The reason that I would really like this is because I frequently check the Top 10 stories and as of recently a lot of them have been about Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama and I would rather see the Top 10 stories on Digg that are not related to Obama or Clinton. I'd love to see this feature come.

Could we apply our profanity filter settings to every page we view on digg (e.g. friends' activities, people's comment histories)? I use digg while I'm at work and would prefer not to download pages containing profanity, but so far as I can tell, there's currently no way to block it anywhere other than in comment threads.

How about huffingtonpost not being on the front page 9000 times a day. I've cut down my Digg use a ton lately because every other front page story is pointless Obama spam from Huffingtonpost.

Anything to cut down the ridiculous amount of Barack vs. Hilary stories. I guess they'll naturally die out in short order anyway, but topics like it that dominate the top stories tend to be annoying.

Any plans on helping people who joined Digg years ago to be able to get the news that made this site great? IE the tech news, the science news that was legit and not BS, and less of the newest 4chan-ish junk. I feel even you guys would agree with this seeing as how alot of the stuff on Diggnation tends to be the 1000-2000ish ranges that used to be the number of what the great stories used to achieve.

Basically i want the old digg back even though its probably impossible at this point...

What about Digg Forum which was promised in the last town hall. A digg forum where users can ask question(s) to digg staff or to other digg users. Digg has a lot of users who have questions which can be answered by other expert digg users. Let's admit it diggers don't user "get satisfaction" service and the only way they can get satisfaction is via digg platform.

Forum Layout ...
Sticky... Message from digg staff
General
Tech
DIY
OffBeat...
World
Sports
Video
Audio
In the forum, digg users can ask a question to digg staff or digg users if they reach particular diggs ( or may be not diggs at all, meaning just like regular forums).

A link to the forum can be placed in the footer of digg pages and the layout of the forum can be somewhat like digg blog.

New comment system looks great... but get rid of deleting. Ya, ya, I know... it is something that most people have wanted for a long time, but I think we have all acknowledged the fact that if you say something ridiculously stupid, you should be held accountable for it, or get ridiculed. If anything, just make it so that you can delete your post for twice the time that you can edit it. I think that would be a good time frame.

I am constantly getting new fans for reasons unknown, it would be nice if if they could give a reason and that I could see what they and I have both dugg easily. I'm always suspicious of a person that would become a fan of someone who never had a submitted story reach the front page.

I have a question: Is there any way to direct traffic so that clicking on a link in the top 10 stories on the front page, or the top 10 hottest stories in upcoming, doesn't link you to the digg submission page itself, but to the story that was submitted? Oftentimes, I will want to read a top 10 story that is maybe a day old...as a result, if it is very popular, it can be several pages back but also have several thousand diggs, which is usually accompanied by a great deal of comments. Having to open the submission page, which can take a while to load if it is a popular story, is very annoying when I just want to read the actual story.

Maybe put two links in each bar in the Top 10 Most Popular sidebar on the front page? For example, clicking on the title of the submission would link you to the story, just like any other normal story on the front page or upcoming, and then maybe a smaller link below that saying "submission" or "comments" that could be clicked and direct the user the the submission page.

I want to hear an honest discussion about the direction Digg has taken. I joined in 05', because I heard about it on TechTV and I really liked the concept of finding odd, unique tech stories. Ever since Digg added the non-tech related sections, there has been an explosion of user growth, which was great because more stories were coming in, but also spam went way up. I didn't like the politics section, so I removed it.
Still, there are special interest groups who have been sneaking them in, and its upsetting. I feel like digg has been hijacked by rude, agenda driven people who have made the digg experience less enjoyable.

How bout the one post per link. I.E. preventing post stealing. This will make sure that the super Digg users won't get to steal all their stories from others. Someone posts a link once, and that's it. No double posting of the same content. If you like it digg it up.

Community can often mean tyranny of the masses. With the shout and buddy system, groups with political, commercial and other agendas push stuff to the front page. Increasingly rare is the everday member who submits a story that eventually becomes popular. Because of this, its lost a lot of appeal. Digg needs to find the right identity - if you're going to legitimately compete (or be a form of) against mainstream media, this biased format can't go on but if you're going to do quirky and tech stories this can be great. Digg is going through a identity crisis and is stuck between the desire to go mainstream and remain a niche for geeks. Right now, anyone who doesn't know about Digg clicking on the main page finds half of it political stuff (I can't even call it news) and weird stuff - not very appealing to anyone. Sadly, digg will be one of those things we'll say years from now that starts with "Remember that whole thing about web 2.0..."

This concerns the iPhone/iPod Touch version of Digg: I'd really like to be able to post comments. Will that ever be possible? Other than that it's great! Is Digg working on a native application for the iPhone/iPod Touch for the release of applications and the Application Store in June?

can we discuss the decline of tech topics and the huge explosion of lame lolcat and 4chan articles?

How about a "digg frame" with buttons such as - Digg it. (129), Read/post comments (230) and close frame.
Cause this would allow for one to be able to digg an article without navigating away from digg, and to not get lost on what exactly they clicked on.
Mockup - http://i28.tinypic.com/2comqtd.png

Removal (or limiting) of shouts? Shouts cause Digg trading and kind of take away from the whole premise of Digg in the first place.

1. Are you still gonna kill the podcast page, or are you gonna replace it with something?
2. When is the new comment system gonna hit?
3. I still think shouts are still an issue, because many people don't like them, and others that want to use them cannot simply delete the shouts they have to be done one by one, and cannot filter them by category, or choose which friends to use, or institute a block user button.
4. I think users abusing commonly dugg topics, such as writing misleading titles on XKCD comics shouldn't be allowed or tolerated on digg.
5. I'm sure there's more topics that should be discussed, and I am open to replies on this

I would like it to display the reason an article was buried instead of just saying inaccurate for all (at the very least i haven't seen it say anything else). Many articles are not inaccurate, they truly are just lame and it saying it is inaccurate is misleading.

Digg has been getting overrun with spam, propaganda and rumors. It's just not as much fun to read any more. I've asked many times before in the forums about having more selections in the "bury" list. It would be a lot more helpful to have more data on why something is being buried, and might help in filtering stories. Maybe if there are several submitted stories from "(sitename).com" that are repeatedly buried under certain categories (like spam), then in the future, stories submitted from that site could be put up for moderator review before being posted on the actual Digg lists.

How about banning the "SUPPORT US, DIGG THIS" box that is on the Huffington post site.

Digg is in desperate need of the ability to edit the headline of a submitted story in case it has mistakes and a separate picture uploader so if digg does not detect a picture or the story does not have one you can add a relevant picture.

When I joined Digg in 2005 I looked at the site as cool stories being submitted by other individuals in a community run by the people. Over the past year or so it feels like there are certain groups getting things pushed to the top. I would normally assume the content of the submission must have been worthy enough to make it to the front page, but when you see the same ridiculous website on the front page more than a few times a day, it seems like the community is being controlled by people who own those sites and their friends. Is there anyway we can have personal filters and filter out news stories coming from a certain site? Often times the articles submitted are so one-sided that it begins to get annoying when you see them constantly.

All of the comments about "I'm sick of seeing..." and "how do I block..." can all be solved by the same thing; a working suggestion engine! A suggestion engine that looks at what I've dugg, what I've buried, what I've viewed but not dugg, etc, then compares that to other users and then suggests content that other users "like me" are looking at and digging would be awesome. This would virtually eliminate all of the complaints about people seeing things they don't care for.

I have another request, but I'll submit that as a separate comment so people can digg/bury each of these independently of one another.

A "report comment as spam" would be awesome. I've noticed so many comments lately which are completely unrelated to the original story.

Instead of having checkboxes for each topic/subtopic, can we have a slider for level of interest? I'm not an avid gamer, but I might be interested in the most popular stories in the gaming category. Similarly, I'm getting burnt out on the US Elections section, but I don't want to miss the submission that gets 10k diggs saying "Obama wins democratic presidential nomination". With both categories, I could set my level of interest to low and then only see the very most popular stories in these categories. Similarly, I can set a high level of interest to the linux category and see more stories in that category.

Besides helping me see more of what I like and less of what I don't, I think this would also help stop people from trying to game the system. When everyone has a different front page, there's no one way to push your spam to "THE" front page.

Better way to highlight comments that point out errors in stories, please. Or possibly have the ability to give reasons for a bury, that would be displayed somewhere. I personally think either of these is an absolute must with the bias and misleading information that pours through.

And you've made a vital flaw just in the description of this story. Choosing to pay attention to the most dugg up comments is flawed, since the ones higher up will always have the most diggs. You're missing out on a large amount of public opinion down here.

Digg needs a NSFW section (reddit has it - http://reddit.com/r/nsfw/).
However, it shouldn't just be one of the topics. It should be handled similar to how many other sites do it, for example StumbleUpon, where when you're submitting you have to choose whether it is NSFW or not. Just like choosing "Video," "Image," or "News Article," you would now choose whether it was NSFW or not, but it would still go under the normal topics. It would make it a lot easier for people to filter it out at work, or just see that stuff (pervs ;) ).

I believe the solution to people wanting the good old tech news that brought them to digg in the first place is a higher level of customization where you can select a certain topic to display on the front page and not only the popular stories show up but you will be able to see all stories with a certain number of digg's as if they were popular stories and hit the front page,basically you can decide how many diggs it takes for a tech story to hit front page, for example if i want to see nothing but great tech news/ stories i could make it so every story that has 20 diggs would show up on the front page. The problem here is not that these great tech stories are not being submitted but they are not hitting the front page and getting dugg as often as they did back a few years ago, and being able to customize what you consider should be promoted to the front page would easily solve this problem.

Get better (or more?) servers or optimize your code a bit better. Don't know bout everyone else, but to me it seems like Digg is running slower and slower each day.

In addition, I think users who continually post articles in the incorrect categories should get warnings, and an eventual suspension/banning. Despite the fact I have political news unchecked, I am still seeing dozens of obama and clinton stories each day - I suspect that is because idiots like posting political news as world news. If you won't give out warnings if a user keeps putting crap in the wrong topics, at least allow us to filter out certain keywords.

Oh, and please add in domain filters. Daily Mail is terrible, I don't want to see it anymore.

I think you should give users the ability to create a personalized front page. I know it kind of sounds like a complete departure from digg, but what if users could choose "Digg Classic" (the status quo), or for instance "My Digg": the ability to create ... I don't know the right word ... categories? For instance, if I really like ESPN.com, on my homepage I would be able to create that category so that I can see the top dugg stories from JUST espn.com.... or the same concept but for a specific search term like "Tiger Woods"... or even other users on Digg. I suppose you can search for these things somewhat right now, but the search kinda blows right now. Having the ability to automate all of it so when I'm on my lunch break I can see what I want to see quickly would be nice.

There should be a link under Digg stories, where you can click "Report as duplicate" or "Submit alternate source." If you reported it as a duplicate, you would be required to choose the Digg story it was a dupe of, and if enough people did this it would show up under the main story as an alternate source. And if you wanted to submit a story but it was already frontpaged, you could just submit it as an alternate source. Also, when submitting, the duplicate check would have an option to select one of the dupes and submit yours as an alternate source to one of those. It would discourage people from submitting dupes, because while a dupe doesn't have much chance of being noticed an alternate source listed with the main story would.

Each story would then have a section for "Alternate Sources" (possibly another tab, next to Comments/Blog it/ etc.). These sources could then be voted on, so alternate sources that are just blogspam will be buried and legitimate alternate sources will show up higher. It would help consolidate topics and prevent dupes from showing up, since people would want to get their sources linked on prominent stories and dupes would be found and changed to alternate sources.

(And I know you can already bury as duplicate, but this is a lot better)

"Digg Suggestions"? Realize what I'm interested in and suggest UPCOMING stories that I might like.