Digg

Digg is a rapidly growing website that emphasizes technology news, and combines social bookmarking, blogging, syndication, with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ (such as Slashdot).

Criticisms

In a peer-edited journal, the combined reader/editors are very good at determining what is and is not interesting. They are not, however, as good at determining what is new or news, and can often fail to recognize old news and rehashed stories. The result is that very hot but old stories, such as the P-P-P-Powerbook scam baiting, are regularly re-promoted to front page status as a new wave of users discover it for the first time.

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The report feature on every article allows users to report duplicate stories, bad links, spam, old news, and "lame" stories. Enough reports on an article can remove it from the main page. Perhaps to prevent abuse, this feature does not appear powerful enough to always work properly. As an example, a video of an Athlon CPU heat sink failure from 2001 "CPU Cooler Removed" received over 400 diggs. Its discussion was filled with comments that the material was dated and gave the wrong impression of current AMD CPUs. Still, it persisted on the front page.

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Link copying

A growing number of Digg users have begun to take the direct links to articles submitted to Digg, and post those links on their personal blogs/websites, without citing Digg as the source. This type of action gives the appearance on these personal sites that users found those stories themselves. Placing links taken from Digg is a feature of the site; users can utilize the 'blog this' feature to create posts on their personal sites. This however creates a reference to Digg. The issue would be compounded in cases which users run advertisements on the sites which they take Digg content without citation.

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Link resubmission

There are many Digg users that will search Digg for interesting articles that never made it to the front page, or have not been on the frontpage recently. Users will then take these links and resubmit them under a slightly modified title in hopes that they will make it to the front page. This can cause items to make the front page in their second or third iteration, by someone who did not submit the original link. In other cases, users will resubmit their own articles, but never made it to the front page, in order to gain in the overall ranking.

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