Early this week I was cruising through the Digg Technology news as I do most mornings but none of the stories caught my eye. It seems to be turning into the standard that the front page is riddled with pretty lame top stories. A couple of examples...

• Spike Jonze Ikea ad
• TWiT 96: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 58 D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
• XP vs. Vista - A Tale of Framerates
• Comcast + Zimbra = Future of Unified Messaging

Now news is all relative I understand that, however to me these stories have no draw. Typically I love Digg, it is a site that I check many times a day. In the last several weeks to a month though, I have found Digg becoming less and less of an interest for me. Junk stories that are just lame are much more prevalent on the front page in recent months, and a recent article on Wisdump made me put additional thought into this as well. If that wasn't enough, as I was in Las Vegas attending MIX07, the Blue Ray code fiasco went down adding more fuel to the fire as suddenly writers started writing about the fall of social news as they were being silenced by the Digg.com admins which took away what they felt was the very service Digg is there to provide.

The Digg team needs to be proactive and take this thing head on. This starts with the group Digging. By group digging I mean groups that band together and all digg the same stories to get them to the front page rapidly. This sort of cheating the system shouldn't be allowed and trending this behavior should be pretty easy.

Here's an abstract simile. Digg is a lot like the U.S. when it was formed in 1776. The idea was to allow freedom, however certain laws were needed to keep some order. Digg is much the same. The social news works on the premise of allowing users to submit all the content, and generally have free reign of the site; however it might be time to tighten down the screws even if it alienates some of your core users.

The majority of the users that complain or decide to quit using Digg as a result of attempts to help Digg move forward will be the ones cheating it. Good riddance! Making it harder for them to get to the front page consistently will discourage and ultimately shut them out. This makes the news that Digg provides of better quality and substance.

What Can Be Done?

There are a lot of things that can be done fairly easily, it's just a matter of users letting go of a little of their freedoms to make Digg a better place. The good news is they don't have to be that obtrusive, here are some examples...

• Ban or degrade the value of users that trends show Digg in groups consistently
• Create a Digg accumulation system where users get a certain number of Diggs per week making what you Digg more important. Quality over quantity is what's important here!
• Make it more difficult for a user who has made the front page with a submitted story to make the front page again for a certain time frame
• Restrict the number of story submissions that are allowed per user in a 24 hour period
• Moderate comment spam (this pushes new users away because of lack of intelligence usually)
• Create trending based on your clicks throughout Digg that track what types of stories you are reading the most and create better front pages with things you are likely to be interested in

The point here is there are a large number of things that can be done to help Digg thrive and not go into a large scale decline because of cheats, and poor conduct.

Something definitely needs to be done. There is too much chatter some of the best writers in the industry just to ignore, and when everyday users are beginning to notice changes toward the negative that should speak volumes.