8 Things Digg MUST Do

Kevin Rose has released the Digg v4 last month and most of the Power Users are mad about it. Along with them, there are probably thousands of other users who have expressed their indignation about the new Digg v4 works. And I do agree with them, because now users have no power and they also can’t submit stories, due to the new auto-import system. Now publishers just enter their feed URL into a field and all the articles or posts are published on Digg. Now users who worked years to gain a few thousands subscribers have been buried by big publishers like Mashable and TechCrunch, who gained tens of thousands of subscribers in just a matter of days. A few days ago, the Digg team fixed it a bit and we don’t see only Mashable and Reddit articles on the frontpage anymore, though the users still have no power to promote interesting stories from smaller websites.

Now here’s what I think Digg must to do regain their users and become the user-powered news website it was before Digg v4:

1. Remove the auto-import feature. It’s really annoying that websites are allowed to import everything they post to Digg. For example, there have been articles from Mashable where they were thanking their sponsors. Also Digg was about choosing only the best and most interesting stories and now is just about who has the most followers.
2. Bring back the upcoming section. The lack of upcoming section only helps the big publishers. Now the users can only get votes from their friends or their friends friends, because the rest can’t see their submissions, while the big publishers have tens of thousands of followers and get much more votes. The algorithm seems to be based on votes and shares on other social networking websites too, which helps them even more.
3. Separate articles, photos and videos. It was just great with the old Digg, when those 3 were separated and one could see what he wanted. Now you don’t know if you are about to read an article or only look at a photo.
4. Bring back the bury button. Now users have the option to hide a story, but it might not be the same as burying it and it’s not that clear for everyone. The bury button was probably the only way to fight against poor article submitted by big publishers and now it’s gone. The only reason I could find for this is that Digg really wants to kill the users and their submissions and transform the social news website into an aggregator.
5. Fix the bugs and stabilize the website. I have been using Digg pretty much lately, because I was curious what they did and wanted to test it. Unfortunately it’s really stressful due to the high amount of errors and bugs. For example, I have 3,082 followers, but when I publish a story I get the message “This story was sent to your 3 followers.” Also I am getting a lot of errors when navigating the website, checking out my followers, voting or hiding stories.
6. Make the top news page default. What’s the point of promoting stories if I see only my friends votes when I login to Digg ? Digg was about promoting interesting things, but doing this goes into the wrong direction.
7. Add the submissions tab to a user’s profile. When I visit a user’s profile, sometimes I want to see what he submitted, not just what he voted lately. With the old Digg it was possible, but now there’s no way of doing this. Also the “friends submissions” page was also really useful. Usually people follow others because they like their submissions and don’t want to follow 50 people and see hundreds of stories voted by them, but submitted by others.
8. Let users socialize easier. A private messaging system or at least the option to comment on someone’s profile would be just great. Digg calls itself a social website, but it lacks a lot of social features.

What do you think about this and is there anything else you would like to see implemented on Digg ?

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Tags: Digg