So a new Digg has been up now for just over 24h, and seeing as I have blogged endlessly about Digg before, it would seem negligent that I don’t put in a short post now. The obvious new focus seems to be on podcasting and videos. A la normal text-based news, you’ll have the opportunity to submit and vote on your favourite podcasts (and episodes). There is also an improved way to vote on videos as well as preview them. And in a strange way, it almost seems like Digg is trying to disintermediate YouTube in a fashion, since you’ll be able to preview videos before you actually see them (which doesn’t exist on YouTube).

And yes, of course there is the new splash of paint as well.

[Which, as an aside, looks so garishly bubble 1.0 it makes me throw up a little. Blue and green? Weren't all 1.0 website blue and green at some stage? (cough cough -- Amazon, anyone?) I mean, sure everyone has had enough of the clear mac-like bubbles, reflections, and fisher-price style writing, but blue and green isn't old enough to be "retro", man!]

Anyway, are there enough changes to make it an upgrade of any other significance? What about issues that Diggers (some of them — the ones that notice) have brought up? Or, better yet ,have even been noticed by the MSM blogger / digital media?

If you break them down, it looks like they’re either not addressed at all, or, are being addressed behind the scenes so that we can’t tell if they’re being updated (after all, the Digg blogg certainly won’t tell you).

1. Recognizing top diggers
The issue of people paying diggers for submissions has made their rounds in the blogosphere; everyone knows it now. What has Digg done to address this issue? Not much. Does moving the “Top Diggers” link all the way to the bottom of the page count? Maybe PR firms and marketers won’t find them there, right?  Right.  And maybe Kevin Rose will appear at one of those Netscape chats to field questions on the issue.

As long as Digg uses the friend system AND values Digg users differently, there will always be persons who will have a higher chance of getting front page submissions. As Digg gets more and more popular, it will be a bigger and bigger funnel for traffic, and marketing types will want to control this as much as possible.

Even if you DON’T believe that Diggers should be paid, the fact that a competitors DOES, coupled with the fact that to reach the Digg Top 30 requires an enormous commitment in terms of time creates a perfect environment for top Diggers to be susceptible to offers of cash. Sure, the Supernova17 case made the headlines, but we don’t know how many haven’t. The best marketers are the ones, after all, you’ve never seen or heard about.

What has Digg done to change this fact? Have they done anything to recognize their efforts other than show who they are? Not to my knowledge.

The solution, could be tackled one of two ways: remove the identifying information for diggers so that Diggers can’t post their emails, blogs and more. [Or, alternatively, make digging anonymous. However, I don't see this happening because KRo and company have openly advocated for a "friend" system.] The other solution is to actually recognize your top Diggers, in terms of recognizing the amount of time it takes to reach that stage of Digg-ship. An email or IM chat with Kev might be worthwhile enough for starstruck Diggers, but the issue of “blackmarket” submissions will never be solved until Digg makes a concerted effort on this issue.  And no amount of software is going to solve it.
2. Digging before reading
Group think is facilitated at Digg by the fact that you don’t have to read a submission before you Digg it. This creates a sense of momentum and velocity, because human nature being what it is, people are drawn to things that stand out — and in this case, it means a high number Diggs.

What happens when people don’t read the submissions? A couple of things: it leads to poor quality submissions, and worse, fake submissions. For fake submissions look no further than the debacle a few months ago around a faked Reuters story involving hundreds of thousands of “broken” PS3’s.

Unfortunately there is no reason for Digg to change this; the quality of submissions won’t cause a signficant change in traffic unless a giant and overwhelming change in the type of of submissions occurs. Moreover, the only thing that weeding out duplicate submissions, fake submissions and poor quality submissions will likely cause is a drop in pageviews, not an overall increase in subscribers OR pageviews.

Since Digg lives on advertising, this is simply not in their best interests.

How to solve this issue? its a tricky one. But one way would be to track users to see, if in the login session, they click on BOTH the story link, and the “Digg” link. Stories that have been both dugg and read get a higher quality of vote, that has a higher chance to get to the top; they could similarly weight the votes for stories that have only been dugg but not read as low, or almost worthless. This would insure that once a critical mass of votes have been achieved, the “Digger as Lemming” effect would be blunted, helping to automatically improve the quality of submissions without weeding out submissions.

3. Bury brigade
Digg is the only social bookmarking site has a button which allows its community to police itself; sadly, its open for abuse in the same way any tool can be abused. Currently, numbers are being tossed around; but, I’ve heard as few as 10 “buries” can bury a submission. This number is likely false; it probably has to do with any number of factors in a day, and are likely the same ones that determine if a site is promoted to the front page.

Factors such as who is burying, when it is being buried, how fast is buried and so on. Unfortunately, even with these (supposed) factors in play, there is still enormous potential for abuse because, in my opinion, it is far too sensitive. And by sensitive, I mean that whatever threshold is set to “bury” something off of Digg proper is probably too low.

My completely hypothetical and untested opinion is that it is easier to “bury” blindly because of your preconceived opinions (I hate Microsoft! I hate blogs! I hate anything that is critical of Digg! I hate that submitter who only submits stuff I hate!) than it is to “digg” something to the front page that you support. Let’s face it: although some Diggers digg blindly, I would wager that even MORE bury blindly based on the title of a submission, or who is submitting that post for consideration.

While it would be difficult to know if any changes were done to the “bury” algo, so far one test of it has shown it to be particularly sensitive. And if you want to test it out, try and submit anything newsworthy that’s has the hint of negativity about Digg. If its popular, it won’t last. CNet’s article about Digg having problems with fake stories that was posted today? Well, its up on Techmeme , but its buried on Digg (after around 200 diggs).

Broadcasting who buries what might be some solution to the problem; but I think what’s called for is a higher threshold for buried posts.  With the huge volume of traffic going through Digg, it just seems like its far too easy to accumulate enough “bury” votes to actually bury stories.

And therefore, it makes it easy for groups with agendas (whether they know they have an agenda or not), to bury stories as well.

So, really, REALLY long post.  Apologies.  Let’s wrap it up.

Digg 4.0 is up — but it looks like there have been no real changes to the ills which have made Digg newsworthy in the past few weeks . The non-recognition of Diggers is its biggest one, and no amount of technology is going to fix that.  As for the others (”Diggers are Lemmings” and “The Bury Button Is Flawed”) there are some solutions, but only time will tell if a behind the scene change in the algo will remedy that.  I doubt that they are going to remove the friends system OR the bury button, so subtle changes are what we can expect.
For a more specific breakdown on Digg’s features you could always go to the horse’s mouth, or try Neil Patel’s breakdown (that cat looks like he’s not phoning it in anymore — way to go Neil!)