A lot has been said about Kevin Rose's desire to harness the "Wisdom of Crowds" on Digg and a recent submission to Digg talks some more about this.
Kevin Rose was all about the "Wisdom of Crowds" when he thought up Digg, it has instead become "Animal Farm" where some Diggers are more equal than others.
To bring back the "Wisdom of Crowds" Digg should do the following:
1) Hide the name of the submitter of a story UNTIL it hits the home page.
If we do not know who submitted an article we will not be tempted to Digg a dupe when someone else posted the same thing a few minutes earlier
2) Just as Digg will stop you from leaving too many comments in a set period of time it should also stop you from excessive burying of comments and stories in a set period of time.
Some people, mostly in the political section, will run through all of the comments and bury ones that do not jive with their political beliefs rather than use the thumbs up/down as a way to prevent spam comments.
Same thing happens with story submissions.
3) Hide the number of Diggs until a story hits the home page.
There is no "Wisdom of Crowds" unless the members of the crowd DO NOT know what the other members are doing. Right now we have the herd mentality where everyone jumps on a winner.
4) After the number of Diggs is shown also provide who Dugg the story and a time stamp of when they Dugg it.
This allows us to see "when" a story gained legs. An extra entry marked "made the front page" with a time stamp would also help.
5) When a story gets buried provide a time stamp and the type of bury the story received, not who buried it.
This is nothing more than a check on the bury system. It's one thing to bury an article as lame or wrong category but to bury an article as spam because you do not agree with it is just plain wrong.
6) Better dupe checking.
I've discussed this at great length on this blog.
7) Provide an "additional links" section to a story so that when someone does submit a dupe story (with a different link) they can add it to an existing story. This link can have a thumbs up/thumbs down Digg option next to it and the submitter can gain "Digg helper" credits rather than "home page" credits.
People post dupes because they want to be the one to get the home page credit for a story. Why? Because home page hits are the experience points of the Digg system!
If an alternate path was created for members to get credit on Digg I think the number of dupes would drop and the site would less congested with duplicate entries.
8) Change the Digg Top Users link to sort not by promoted stories but by a column that better represents a members contributions to Digg. Perhaps we need an extra column that averages out their submissions, Diggs and comments divided by the number of days they have been on Digg?
This is the fastest way to combat Digg's "Animal Farm" mentality.
Last but not least, how about adding a "cloud view" to the friends section? I have a lot of friends and I'd much rather use the cloud view to see what they are digging/submitting/commenting on.
Those are my views as a long time digger. Feel free to comment.
