Thoughts on digg.com
mancide’s blog - Thoughts on digg.com
Mancide has posted some insightful comments on how digg.com could be improved. One issue he mentioned is “click-through” submissions - i.e. users submitting links to their own blogs, which in turn have a link to the actual story. I have already suggested to the digg folks they add some way of crediting the source of the link (i.e. where they discovered it). Another addition I would add would be a way to add alternative links to already submitted stories. I picture it being sort of like Google’s news page. One news story could have many sources, each with a different twist.
Another improvement that could be made is with the categories. In their current form, they don’t provide much value to the end user besides being able to subscribe to the various RSS feeds. Tagging might be a better approach, similar to del.icio.us or flickr. Some of the current categories are too ambiguous. What does “links’ mean? Isn’t everything on digg.com a link of some kind? If I’m submitting a story that is a web development reference of some kind (which seems to be a common theme), what category should I use? Software? Technology? Design? Link? …food for thought.
Hopefully as digg.com becomes more popular, the number of diggs required to promote a story can be increased. In theory, the more people filtering the content, the better the content will be.
March 30th, 2005 at 10:07 pm
Thanks for the positive feedback! Yes, I’ve seen some comments by other people reguarding the categories and different ways to approach those. However, I think if the two-level approach is used in promoting stories to the frontpage it would increase the value of the categorie pages instantly. They would then be the pool of stories to select from to promote to the front page. There are lots of stories worthy of a category placement that may not be worth putting on the front page. This would keep the front page dedicated for the best and most worthy stories. The fact that there are RSS feeds for practically every page on digg would also still keep the individual category pages useful to those of us with RSS readers. As they are right now they are little more than slower rolling collections of front page posts and not too useful in my opinion.