This past week I came across a great article on Digg titled The Statistics Behind Digg: What Makes the Front Page. The article it’s self was great, but one of the comments on the story was even better. I wont’ repeat what RonPaulLite said, but I found his arguments resonated highly with my own opinions. Ironically the post fell just short of the front page.

I think Digg is one of the greatest websites out there, but it could be even better. Here are my recommendations to fix some of the current problems on Digg:

Improve The Upcoming Stories Section

So much crap gets submitted to Digg each day there’s no way that anyone could possibly hope to wade through it all. It’s just not worth it. That’s why most users only surf the front page. Even if a user is more daring they rarely venture beyond the top 10 in the upcoming section. The result is that unless you get a bunch of quick Diggs to put you in the upcoming section your story is sunk. The upcoming section should be completely revamped to encourage users to find new stories that nobody has seen yet.

Remove Shouts

I can see what my friends are submitting, digging, and adding to their favorites. Shouldn’t that be enough? I like the fact that they are trying to encourage more user interaction, but all shouts do is encourage spam. It’s like “hey I’ll read your spam if you read mine”. It’s rare that you are added as a friend simply because that person knows you, or likes the content you provide. Friends on Digg are completely hollow attempts by users to promote stories to the front page.

Favor The New

The current system has become far too favorable to the already established. There’s not a day that goes by that you don’t see a story from The Huffington Post taking shots at John McCain. It gets old, and we’re still months away from the election. There used to be a time when Digg was a great way to find fun new articles. A place where you see information and opinions that you don’t see every day. Now the whole site is being held hostage to a small array of select groups.

Bury Brigade

The Digg user base needs to realize that the bury button is there for a reason. Far too much content hits the front page that has no business in being there. Eventually everyone got sick of hearing about Ron Paul all the time, so they buried it. So what’s stopping us from doing it now? The bury brigade needs to start doing their job again!

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