Digg 2.0 - What's new ?

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A couple of weeks ago I made a posting to the Digg site and as most of you would expect failed to log even a single Digg. Nothing too bad about it, probably almost everybody starts this way. I simply reasoned that my content was not good enough to receive any Digg's and thought of writing more interesting and relevant content. Made a few more postings and still had absolutely no luck and started thinking why this was happening.

As may be a few other's was easily able to find a few holes in the way Digg works in ranking the pages that get submitted to Digg. At that point the sole thought that came to my mind was that Digg's way of page ranking as solely dependent on only one factor - 'how fast does a posting get its first few votes'. If you can log the first few votes, the rest is simply herd mentality after that. In more cases than not, its only a matter of time before such a posting moves up the ranking.

Did not really delve too much into that topic, but today as I saw that Digg was getting revamped was curious to know what changes one could expect. During this search exercise, I came across two more interesting posts titled "The Digg Economy" and "Will Digg get flanked?" today which I thought covered relevant points.

In the posting "Will Digg get flanked?" suggestions that are made out to Digg are,

1. Do not reveal the number of “diggs” accumulated by a story until after the story reaches the front page
2. Enable Diggers to make and/or see comments only after voting or declining to ever vote on a story.
   
3. Reward those who make constructive comments on stories, and penalize those who make disruptive and unconstructive ones - Although I agree with the 'rationale' that comments should be categorized as constructive or not, it would be extremely difficult to implement this and I feel this suggestion is not worthwhile.

In addition to not agreeing to the last point, let me add a couple of other suggestion possibilities -

1. How about having special voting rights for some classified experts - something similar to the special voting rights on company shares. One vote from these identified set can count for say 10 or 100 normal votes. If some body wants to complicate things the multiplier on any identified expert depends on how many of his voted posts in fact makes it to the top of the heap
2. How about having it necessary to get a few votes say 10 or 20 from identified experts before the post gets opened out to everybody else. A ranking system can be put in place to identify and dismantle experts on a regular basis ?

May be my suggestions are not easily implementable but I don't see a reason why it cant be tried. Digg is hugely successful and I would look towards Digg to make the great concept that it started off or at least popularized a better one too.

Two things that I look forward to a site like Digg - anybody else looking for something different - pls comment !

1. Dont want economies of scale (# of controlled votes being the unit of measurement) become a barrier for my opinion to be heard
2. Whatever be the logic / approach that is adopted, so long as I as a user of the site is able to vouch for the 'relevance' and 'usefulness' of the content I find at the top of the Digg heap I am happy !

Tags: digg, page ranking