Game: verb; the art of promoting articles on digg via manufactured methods, rather than real social trends.
Gaming frequently leads to blog spam, and worthless trash (read my comment as to why) and in general is bad for the community. Even still, gaming is not the only problem on digg. The mob mentality often takes over, and illogically promotes poor quality submissions. So, I have a few ideas on how to fix both.
..:: Don’t Show Digg Counts on the Front and Comment Pages Until a Story is Dugg
This prevents hyping stories just because a story is highly dugg. There are plenty of lemmings who will digg just because others have dugg an article, and this would eliminate that. People would be forced to think for themselves for once. One might argue that people might not have time to read something, so they digg a popular story and come back to it later. If you really don’t have time, just use the search function to find popular stories. We should lead the mob, not let the mob lead us.
..:: Don’t allow Digging until an Article is Read
The outgoing link from the front and comment pages should be something like
The database would store that user johnSmith opened this article at 9:17:30pm. User johnSmith shouldn’t be able to digg the article until 9:18:00pm. The “digg it” button wouldn’t show up until 30 seconds after the article link has been clicked. Sure this could be gamed, but the gaming would be incredibly reduced. Users wouldn’t be able to just click on their friend’s submission pages and instantly digg every single article. Digging an article would require 30 seconds of your time to actually read an article, or watch a video.
Combining the previous two suggestions, an article would be able to appear in three different states. These images are just examples. I’m sure someone with more training/experience in photoshop could do better.
State 1: Unread and not yet dugg (notice that the submitter’s name is removed, and the option to digg is removed)
State 2: Read but not yet dugg (the digg count and submitter are not shown)
State 3: Dugg
Maybe the blank space in the first image on the left side could be replaced with some icon saying “View to Digg”, but you get the idea.
..:: Don’t Show Comments’ Digg Counts Until Modded
Once someone’s comment gets below -4 diggs, the comment folds up. To get below -4 diggs (under default settings), a user must open the buried comment, and then digg it down further. This goes back to the lemming problem. People will follow the masses just because the masses are doing it. A user should always be able to see their own comment scores (so they know what is liked and what is inappropriate) and the comment scores of comments they’ve modded. Users should not see any other comment scores.
..:: Stop First Comment Spam
Many users reply to the first comment just to get their comment seen. Rather than order all threads solely by timestamp, order the threads by score descending and then timestamp ascending. Since the comments to these threads are much like discussions, the comments to the threads should still be only in timestamp order. Stupid threads would automatically sink to the bottom, while meritable topics would float up to the top.
..:: Automated Duggmirror Mitigates Diggslamming
It is a fact of any aggregated news system. Many sites will be slashdotted and diggslammed. All we can do is utilize mirrors. Put a duggmirror link on every comment page. If that link starts getting used to some statistical usage per unit time, put the duggmirror link on the front page next to the article’s link. Many people would use this, and it would get the article’s servers back up faster.
..:: Change the “Wrong Topic” Bury Option to “Improper Submission”
This flag would be warranted by bad descriptions (like “Title says it all!”), wrong topics, and fear-mongering/alarmist headlines that are only worthy of being on Fox News. Users come to internet news sites like digg to get away from the filthy journalism that plagues so much of the traditional media’s news. We’re better than that, and we should not promote it. Past improper submissions would be taken into account in the algorithm that gets a submitter’s articles to the front page.
..:: Cross Reference Similar Articles on the Comments Page
When you submit an article, dupeCheck looks for similar articles. The Comments page should show these articles (in a smaller form - just title, description, and a link to the comments page - no topic/user/submission time/etc). This way, dupes could be found much easier. When submitters violate dupeCheck by submitting an article from one source, but another source already reported the same news, these submitters would be exposed, and the quality of digg would once again, be improved. Additionally, this would promote other articles in the same topic.
..:: Add a Few Upcoming Stories to the Bottom of the Front Page
Similar to my proposed cross reference section for Comment pages, the bottom of the digg front page should have a small section that randomly chooses 5 articles from the last 72 hours, which have not made it to the front page, and show the title, description, and a link to the comments page. This would allow more genuine promotion of articles as gaming and the mob mentality would be reduced by the above mentioned changes.
..:: Conclusion
With these changes, the mob mentality and the game-ability of digg would greatly be reduced. Users couldn’t digg something until they read it, and people would stop doing things because everyone else does it.