Digg Duplicates, A Fundamental Flaw Exposed
A while back I wrote, Observations on Digg’s Quality, today I have found another fundamental flaw with digg’s quality. Here’s how it happened.
I was taking a quick break from the day job earlier and was checking my RSS feeds and saw this:
Three stories about the iPhone had made the Technology front page. However upon opening the Technology front page only one of them was listed, the other two apparently had been buried. Well, I think to myself, this is great the community is policing itself well. Then I open the front page story to read the story. What do I find? A link to a flickr photo, a lousy picture at that.
That got me to wondering, what were the other two post? One was to a blog, that contained only a picture, a better picture mind you, and the other to an engadget article containing not only some prose on the subject, but contained 50 separate pictures. Now considering that this post had not only some prose, but also many more pictures than the other two articles, why was it buried as opposed to the single poor quality post?
Was the digg administrators closing front page stories that were duplicates? Was it digg users mass burying without reading? I can’t begin to guess, but for certain this points out a sever flaw in digg’s duplicate problem. Perhaps more interesting was the time-line of the submissions.
- http://digg.com/apple/Apple_Announces_iPhone
(original of the front page article with same title, engadget, never made front page) - http://digg.com/apple/Apple_Releases_iPhone
(1 minute later, engadget, made front page but buried) - http://digg.com/apple/Apple_Announces_iPhone_2
(3 minutes later, poor flickr picture, front page story +6000 diggs) - http://digg.com/apple/Apple_iPhone_Announced
(4 minutes later, blog post, single picture, made front page but buried)
As far a quality and timeliness are concerned, either of the first two articles should be the front page post. So what gives digg? Kevin? Jay? can the digg staff offer any explanation for this?
Until next time.
-3Monkeys
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January 10th, 2007 at 8:37 am
This is quickly fixed by allowing users to merge similar articles together, not exactly a “fundamental flaw”. Once the articles are merged together, all of the links that are merged are directed to the main article.
This is an idea I had a long time ago (and surprised that digg hasn’t even implemented something like this) for a social news site I was creating.
January 10th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Don,
Thank you for your comments , I feel as you do that this issue should be addressed by digg. I and others have offered up the solution you suggest in the past as well. Hopefully the digg staff will make this type of functionallity a reality. But I doubt they will.
January 12th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Yeah I feel this feature is sorely needed as I always digg and read about 4-5 articles on the same story, but each offers a unique take on the story and everybody just diggs down any duplicates. If Digg are serious about being a social NEWS site rather than a social “look what random old articles ive found on the web” site then they need to do something about it.