Double-Digger: Scourge or Savior?

(Taking a break from movies and TV today to write about one of my favorite sites, Digg. All Digg usernames have been blacked out, but obviously they can be found if you look. I blacked them out because I'm not trying to call out any particular user, but just commenting on a general trend)

How many times has this happened to you: You're cruising through the web at work or at home and you find an incredible story/blogpost. This story has everything! An interesting, attention-grabbing title, some great investigative journalism, and insightful commentary into the topic that the post is based on.

Being the great human being that you are and wanting to share this story with the world, you head on over to digg.com and submit the story, only to see the following page:

(just an example, not an actual story I dugg, or would digg)

Someone has already submitted it! This can be frustrating, but it happens all the time, and rightfully so; Digg has some great users with a keen eye for interesting content. This is indisputable. What's frustrating is when promising stories get crappy titles and descriptions, thus dooming them to the storage rooms of Digg's servers forever.

This is what happened to my friend the other day, who tried to digg this great story about Fox's newest, hottest version of Ann Coulter (or "Ann Coulter 2.0"). The original link to the story can be found here:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/29/marsden/index.html

This was a blistering, well-written piece about Rachel Marsden's twisted and troubled past, and how conservative Fox has overlooked it in favor of her, well, looks. When he tried to digg this, he got this message:


No offense to the poster, but this is a pretty awful story title with a terrible description that doesn't really give a good impression of what the story is about or how high the story's quality is. In fact, the title could actually turn people off to the story who would otherwise be interested in what this piece has to say. Needless to say, it didn't make the front page.

But the crimes don't even have to be that egregious. One of the most popular stories on cnn.com today is this one:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/04/09/googlingyourdate.ap.ap/index.html

This morning, this made the top headlines at cnn.com with the title, "How Google Has Revolutionized Dating." This is a great title for a Digg story and the article was fairly interesting, exploring how being able to google your date has changed the dating scene. When I tried to Digg it, I found this:


To be fair, the person had used CNN's own title for the story. But when I see "Googling Your Date" as a story title, it doesn't really make me want to click and apparently many Digg users agree. The AP story that the cnn link is based on might still make front page (Update 1: The story has made front page, but under a different title and from a different website. See link here), but I think it's unlikely that the exact link I've shown above will make it. Given this, could the title and description have changed the outcome of these stories? We'll never know for sure, but it's a real enough possibility that it deserves some discussion.

So what can you do if you encounter this situation, where you have a great story you want to share that's been given short shrift, potentially due to its title or description? There are two obvious workarounds that I'll describe, but before I get into them, just know that I'm just describing these methods and not necessarily endorsing either one:

1) Submit a link from another source, like a blog ABOUT the story, or another news source - Not too complicated but this can be dangerous: re-posting a story onto your blog and then Digging it can lead to blogspam buries.

2) Submit a link using an RSS Feed - Often RSS feed links are different than the ones you find on the originating webpage. For example, this link goes to the same Rachel Marsden story as above, but would not count as an automatic duplicate submission on Digg:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/03/29/marsden/index.html?source=rss

Have stories made the front page using this method? Definitely. But should they have?

I'm of the opinion that if a story is important, if it's fascinating, if it's funny, if it's attention-grabbing, it should be given a second chance if someone didn't do it justice the first time around. In the end, it might make Digg a little bit more bloated, but it will allow Digg to keep fulfilling its mission: Delivering interesting, insightful, and user-driven content to all of our computer screens.

Perhaps a more significant question is, should Digg do anything to rectify this "problem" of duplicate submissions of the same exact story? Alternatively, could there be a way to allow people to digg a story again (after 48 hours, or something) to give it another chance? Or would total anarchy ensue? (It probably would). Many people have suggested ways to block duplicate submissions and Digg users are very good about burying, or simply not digging, duplicate stories. But I'm of the opinion that some duplicate submissions might be acceptable, and in fact, encouraged in some cases, depending on the story.

What do you think? Is there a better solution?

Update 2: First, some clarifications: Digg user crossmr has accused me of both 1) Changing my blog text (after my blog hit the front page of Digg) to say that I don't necessarily endorse the duplicate submission methods described above, and 2) Promoting blogspam. Both of these are untrue. I knew from the beginning that people who didn't understand my argument would accuse me of promoting blogspam, so from the start, I made sure to make explicit the fact that my describing those methods of duplicate submitting was not an endorsement of them.

As for blogspam, the thought that I would promote this is preposterous. Blog posts commenting on a story are fair game; Arstechnica.com shows up on Digg a dozen times a week and they are usually commenting on the latest tech developments. But reposting a story to your blog and just submitting it to Digg without any commentary or insight is a waste of everyone's time, including yours. Also, it's against Digg's rules.

There have been some great suggestions put forth as to what might help. Users like linkedlist and callinthelaw69 don't seem to mind the duplicate submissions that much, and I'm sure there are many that agree. User Entropyman spent some time thinking up a system whereby related stories would be linked on Digg. I would describe it here but since it's a bit involved, instead I'll just post a link to the dialogue here. Similarly, user msjacoby recommends a swarm system whereby related stories move through Digg together. And user joejoeknows brought up an interesting idea of making duplicate submissions automatically digg the story, with the possibility of voting for a summary change.

No idea if the powers that be will actually read this post or if they even care about this, but if they do read it, I think there's some good food for thought here. In any case, I know that many of these changes are easier said than done. I'm very grateful for Digg the way it is. Could it be made better from some of these suggested changes? They'll have to decide.

Thanks so much for reading and for all the great comments!