Sean-Ward.com

I like digg, but I found out today that trying to be a good community member left me feeling like Sisyphus.

I browse digg on average three times a day: morning, afternoon, and evening. I don’t submit too many stories, but I read a chunk of articles at any given time, digg things that I find interesting, comment if I absolutely feel the need, and bury when I must. Don’t take that last one the wrong way; I bury articles when they are one of the following:

• a “testing digg” post,
• the wrong topic,
• obviously spam, or
• blatant self-digging.

The first is pretty easy to find. Typically it’s a title is something like “Just a test” with a description of “Testing the Digg Submission System”. These just baffle me make think, and occasionally comment, “Trust me, the digg submission system works. Did you miss the fact that other people can get it to work?” You know their just up to no good and will probably lead to number 3 shortly.

The second thing I bury are posts in the wrong topics. These are also easy to spot, with titles like “Hot Job” and description “He’s got a great job!” being put in the category “Design.” Considering that “Design” is surrounded by “Apple” above and “Gadgets” below, it’s not like they mis-selected the category. Surprisingly, if you follow the link, you see a not-at-all-funny picture. Items in the wrong category also tend to lead to spam.

The thing about items posted under the wrong topics is that it didn’t fit in any of the available topics. Guess what? If it doesn’t fit in a topic, don’t digg it, it’s that simple. I’ve come across a couple articles online and thought “This’ll be a great digg!” only to find out that it didn’t fit in a given category. On a side note, the Charisma 20 shirt over at Real Life was one such item.

They say “all roads lead to Rome,” and that’s the case in regards to things I tend to bury on digg. While I haven’t spent the time to track those who do test posts, as the only two I do know of haven’t done anything lately, and that looking up “test” doesn’t get you very much, I can’t say for certain that testing leads to spamming. But given the fact that you don’t need to test the fact that digg works, you could actually try to digg a real article first, or if this is on a personal site, make a post and try digging it as if you know it works.

Wrong topics almost always make me think spam, since most digg spammers are just going to skim the topics and randomly pick something. The real dastardly thing they do is then give it a fake title and/or description so that it fits in the category, and before you know it, you’re looking at an article that has nothing to do with the description you just read on digg.

There are also those spammers who promote things in the right categories and dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. Their list of dugg and submitted sites however typically only rotate between a handful of different sites. While they are putting things in the right places, it’s an abuse of digg in my opinion. I’m not against them and their attempt at making money. I’m just upset that they focusing on the money first and the digging is jsut a means to an end.

Real abuse is sometimes due to the ability to have a site added to digg with the click of a link on a site or the simple submission of an article. I have seen quite a lot of Hubpages on digg, and almost every single one has been a wrong topic. I think that if one wasn’t a wrong topic it was completely by accident or someone is really trying. However, when you see a title of “Stick weaving for a quick homemade gift” and a description of “As weaving goes, this is the fastest way to do hand weaving I’ve ever seen. Come see my photos and learn how to do it” listed as “Offbeat News”, you don’t even have to click the link to know it is not news, let alone offbeat. If you check on the user profile of the person that submitted it, you’ll probably find pages upon pages of dugg articles. However, those dugg articles will all be self-submitted articles, which is item four, which follows.

While I understand that depending on a particular site’s presence in the web, it may not get dugg unless the site owner or a dedicated, regular visitor diggs an article. So I’m not against self digging. However, I am against people who do 50% or more self digging. Typically, the real culprits have one or two stories dugg that were submitted by someone else, but every other article listed in their list of dugg stories is all from the same site, which matches their username.

Things can always change though. If more topics are added and some of those sites I (almost) automatically mark as spam have a proper place to go, I won’t care as much. IF asked, I would suggest a top-level “Blog” category with possibly items like “Personal” and “Professional”. Once the automated moderation algorithm has had more practice, it’ll catch more of the user spam, so they’ll actually have to try to be real diggers. Even the bury system can be cleaned up. Even though it tries to be generic, there are some items it can’t accurately categroize, such as outdated news and articles.

Am I going to self-digg this article? Probably. I’m gonna try my hardest to find a category that fits, but I already believe there won’t be one. The standard, though, appears to be to put any digg news in the “Tech Industry News” category.

“When in Rome” and all that.

I’ll post it and if it gets buried, it gets buried. If I get flamed, I get flamed. If some actually choose to read the article, perhaps they’ll see where I’m coming from and leave it be.