digg - The Honeymoon is Over

I fell in love with digg a little over a week ago. I've been using it pretty much non-stop ever since, but I'm starting to notice some serious drawbacks to this social aggregator, much like how you can be blind to flaws in the early stages of a romance, but soon become annoyed by the daily frustrations and foibles of your partner.

The system can be "gamed". Any post that makes it to the front page will pretty much explode with traffic. Many people are posting links to their personal blogs to get traffic, or just posting "digg bait", stories and musings about digg itself that are designed to get the digg faithful to digg the story. Above and beyond that, it's possible to exploit the people that watch the "digg spy" for diggs by undigging and redigging a story repeatedly to get it to pop up on this screen enough times to get attention. I haven't done this myself (except to see if it were possible), but considering I've seen diggs popping up in the spy that don't increase in digg count, I know it's being done.

The system can be "lame". What I mean by that is that there is ridiculous, pointless shit popping up on the front page all the time, mainly because people aren't READING the stories before they digg, or aren't savvy enough to know when a story just isn't true. Plus, even if you undigg, once the story hits the front page, it's there until it's pulled by the staff. For a site that would supposedly cull the chaff from the wheat, a lot of chaff is getting mixed in. Repeat stories, off-topic crap, and things that generally aren't useful or are already fairly common knowledge. Slashdot has the same problem, but to a far less degree because the editorial staff has to approve stories.

Overall, I'm still liking the response time to news that digg has, which is a major advantage over Slashdot and other systems. Unfortunately, I'm finding that much like my Hotmail inbox, I'm sifting through a lot of "digg spam" in order to find the good stuff. Luckily, the digg spy refreshes fast enough to make this tolerable. The digg staff has some work to do yet, like making comments more useful, adding more categories (and letting us filter on those categories!), fixing bugs (digg spy frequently shows old diggs as only a day old, when they can be months old), but overall, the experience has settled down from the hot-and-heavy infatuation stage, into something more routine and comfortable ... and frustratingly annoying at times.

I still love you, digg. I just wish I could change you, and make you perfect.

Edit: Interesting idea from the comments on the digg post for this entry ... the idea of being able to "bury" a story instead of digging it". Basically giving it a -1 instead of a +1. Would be a great way for the site to police itself, making sure that truly worthy stories are the ones getting the traffic. Raising the threshold before a story gets to the front page would be nice as well, given digg's increase in traffic.