One of my pet peeves currently is when people badly submit an article to digg. It is bad for both digg readers (who may never get to see the article because it was dugg badly) and of course for the publishers. It’s definitely a flaw in the digg system. But there is a relatively easy solution for this problem, which I’d like to suggest here.
First let me explain what I mean by a ‘badly dugg post’. Take for example Alex’s excellent post here about Apple’s iPhone strategy. It explains why the iPhone is more than just a breakthrough mobile phone device – that it’s a strategy that may expand Apple’s sphere of influence, from web browsing to social networking and even possibly search. Now look at the digg submission for that post:
Title: iPhone May Really Matter
description: “The iPhone is here. The blogosphere is echoing with both great praise and cries of problems. The hype was both met and a bit too much. Overall, it seems that both media and users are underwhelmed with the iPhone as the phone.”
OK, the title is passable (only missing out the ‘Why’). But the description makes the article out to be an anti-iPhone post, which it is not. Plus it completely misses the point of Alex’s post, which is that Apple has a larger strategy for the iPhone. So the context to the original article has been lost – which in this case actually led to the story being buried.
Another example: someone submitted our Top 100 Alt Search Engines article today like this:
In this case, the title is completely meaningless and the description incomprehensible. To make matters even worse, it was submitted under “Tech Deals”!
It doesn’t need to be this way. One relatively painless enhancement digg could make to the site is to allow a badly submitted post to be edited – perhaps by a power digg user, who is given privileges to ‘fix’ bad submissions. Normal digg users can then continue to submit posts (because don’t get me wrong, I am very happy for any digg user to submit articles of ours), but at least there is some quality control over the submissions. There would only need to be a flag that the digg story has been edited, and a way for users to check the original submission wording – so that everything is transparent.
I think this is win-win – because all digg users can continue to submit any article they find, but if they happen to submit it with a bad title and/or description, then a digg editor can fix it up (there could even be a special email form for publishers to request a fix). No harm done, the normal diggers still get points for submitting good articles, the publishers are happy, the end digg user is happy because they get to see quality articles on the frontpage. OK, I am very biased in suggesting this — but what do you think of the idea?
