What’s Wrong With… Digg
Jun 1st, 2007 by Rich Page
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Digg.com. Its a very popular way of ‘voting’ for webpages and articles on blogs. And its gaining huge popularity (even some contraversy) online lately - I use it ‘vote’ for other stories, and as a way of seeding the blog posts that I write, in the hope that other people see it and vote for it too. I loved it at first. Yet, the more I use Digg, the more I become frustrated with it - so I thought I would make a blog post about what’s wrong with Digg, and what should be fixed/improved. Here’s my ‘insight’:
1: Poor categories for digging. Digg used to be for a techy audience only, which reflects their current categories like ‘Gadgets’, ‘Apple’ and ‘Playstation 3′. Which is fine, but now they appeal to anyone, not just techies. So why oh why don’t they broaden the categories and subcategories. Take my Z57 real estate blog. Whenever I digg a new article, the only one that it can go under is ‘Business and Finance’ - which is way to broad. There is no category for ‘real estate’ or ‘marketing’, which would be a better place to post. Digg should take a look at one of their ‘voting’ website competitors, Netscape, and see their much more versatile category system - they call it ‘channels’ there. Surely this is an easy fix Digg!
2: Bad search. And when I say bad, I mean Digg’s website search is pretty much useless as a search. Most results it comes up with are irrevelant. Try searching for ‘dating’ or ‘real estate’ on there for example, and you will usually find nothing of relevance. It seems to search everything, including comments, and doesn’t even do a good job of pulling relevant results that way either. So that makes it pretty much useless to try and find other peoples most voted content, other than just looking at the home page and by category. Delicous and Netscape have great searches - so why don’t you? Better yet, why don’t you add a tagging system (like delicious) and use that to help improve the search? Come on Digg, get with the program - take a leaf out of Google’s search book!
3: Inconstitent ‘digging’ process. For some reason, sometimes when you click ‘digg’ on other websites, it requires an extra ‘digg’ step by actually clicking on the article’s ‘digg’ badge on digg.com. But sometimes just clicking on the ‘digg’ on the website you are voting for is all you need to do (apart from login). Very strange. And if you didn’t notice the ‘digg’ count before, you might not even know that you hadn’t properly ‘digg’ed the article you wanted. That way, your ‘digg’ doesn’t count and you didn’t even know. Fix please!
4: Lack of ability to review ‘diggers diggs’. Why doesn’t Digg let you rate other peoples ‘digging’ ability and relevance? Look at amazon.com for example - you can rate other peoples reviews. The more ‘useful’ votes the review gets, the higher it shows in the review listings. Digg could easily do this, (by having a thumbs up or down system) and it would encourage more accurate digging, and would act as a way to limit ‘crappy’ digging. If you liked what I digged and found my diggs to be useful, then surely my diggs should carry more ‘weight’ and be shown above other diggs of equal digg count. This would make for a much better ‘digging’ user experience and add to the community aspect of digg - something which is lacking right now, even though it lets you add friends (big deal!).
So come on Digg, I do love using your website, but lets hear some answers to these questions (which I am sure other people have wondered too!) Please help and ’share this’ article with other people. Hopefully eventually someone at Digg will see this post and answer these questions!
