What is digg

Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories [Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg].  Many users love digg, that’s why it has a traffic rank of 243 on Alexa. So why sucks ass, you’ll ask…

Well the story that spilled the water from the glass, I won’t hide it, is that I got banned from digg due to violation of terms (I tend to get banned from all sorts of different social websites, like DeviantArt, but I didn’t say that they sucked).

To make a long story short, their website had an error while submitting and as a good boy, I submitted this to the administrators. It came up by checking my IP, that I had created a second account, which violated their terms. I assume that they found out using my IP, where they store it on every single page, but that’s ok nowadays because it’s for our own protection, how else could they have found out?

So why isn’t ok to have a second account? To protect system integrity, they responded! Phew!

What if I want to have a second account to digg adult stuff, or to have a second account to hide from my other “legitimate” one for me to freely wobble around, what if I have a sister and we only have one computer and she logs in and creates a digg account because we love digg so much? What if I have a shared IP with another dude, due to my ISP sucking as well? What if digg? Digg Inc. doesn’t care, they just became another arrogant Inc. that forgot how it got there; from us, the contributed users who kept using their website.

Anyway, I always thought digg sucked, not because of this incident, and I’ll explain why below.

Digg’s stupid policy

Diggs policy: one person, one account. Correction: one IP one account… I explained it above as well, this issue is much thinner than how digg treats it. The thing is that I didn’t know that policy, my bad, but that doesn’t make it a stupid policy! If you are so concerned of people artificially inflating the ‘digg count’, as you say, then ask from your website development staff to come up with a system that wouldn’t let people digg stuff that were submitted from the same IP, if you’re that smart!

Digg’s confusing navigation

Digg’s navigation has like a “popular” tab with sub filters of “most recent”, “top in 24hr”, “7days” etc, and another tab with “upcoming” with sub selections of “most recent”, “most diggs”, “most comments”. It already started to get confusing, especially for the new users. We then have another tab next to those, with “news”, “images”, “videos” and “customize”! As these weren’t enough, on top there are another 51 or so categories! You have to spend like one year only to learn navigating around, and finding what you want! Less is more digg, less is more! Learn from stumbleupon! Check out the navigation of the both websites:

Submission takes like forever

When submitting to digg it’s like you have to run 10 miles, then jump 2m high in the air, reach your elbow with your tongue, take off your one eye and replace it with the other, and then report to digg. After I manage to submit a story to digg I often feel like Hercules when he finished the 12 Labors!

All this humiliation for what? For me to be able to submit my story to digg! No way! Another thing I found annoying is that there are always finding some duplicates, and never were on my case, and I have to swear that the story I’m submitting is original!! “Totally original, I swear!”

Swear on your momma that you’re not stupid for not being able to figure it out!

Real Facts

Ok, all the above are just opinions, I know many who like the fact that there is a button saying “Totally original, I swear” although I find it inappropriate! What I’m going to show you below are some stats from my website, using Awstats.

The stats are from month 3, up until day 10.

As you can see, 20 visits coming from digg and 1002 visits from stumbleupon! I have to say that for both the websites I didn’t do anything, like add friends, stumble/digg other stories etc, just submitted the story and flew off! Don’t underestimate the power of stumbleupon. Maybe for your websites you have different numbers, but for me, digg is no good!

So I’ll be applying the 80/20 principle to this and I’ll be focusing on google and stumbleupon!

Community

From what I used digg, about a week, It gave me a feeling that digg’s community is a bit arrogant and ignorant to the new members. They think that digg is the only social bookmark on the internet, obviously wrong. That’s only the feeling that they gave me, which biases the facts above so don’t take into consideration.

Conclusion

These are only some quick problems I could find, because I didn’t want to spend more time on dealing with nothing, but if I had, I’d certainly find more problems.

What is certain is that I won’t be using digg ever again, I didn’t want to from the beginning but I said to give it a try and see what’s with all this madness, I’ll soon also make a t-shirt anti-digg which I’ll be wearing, feel free to buy it yourself if you have the same opinion as me. This is what happens with all the Inc. as soon as they grow big, they stop caring about their users. The same happened with facebook, youtube and many more, as soon as they got big.

Go stumbleupon, reddit, del.ici.ous, etc, etc!

Please respect my views as I respect yours….

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