Why Digg Sux

[dalebert]

plz digg

Dugg! (Even though I hate the site)

OK, moved the quote so as not to derail the other thread. Here's the thing about Digg, and it's just one thing. There's surely more.

As big as Digg seems to be, you'd think they'd have the basic sense to know that

http://anarchyinyourhead.com/2008/04/18/lack-of-faith-is-a-virtue/

is the same site as

http://anarchyinyourhead.com/2008/04/18/lack-of-faith-is-a-virtue/#comment-404

Any pound sign (#) in a URL just refers to a specific piece of text in that URL and causes the page to scroll down to it. And yet Digg treats it as a separate URL! If you click a "Read the rest of this entry" link on someone's Wordpress blog, it takes you the specific URL and scrolls you down to the point where you finished reading. That's a logical feature on Wordpress. What's not logical is that digg now sees it as a separate URL so if you have a digg counter, it will show zero diggs. Now if someone clicks the digg button, it will likely see the similarity and tell them it's already been dugg. All fine and dandy IN THEORY. However, I'll tell you something I've learned from experience. If that counter says zero diggs, it'll never get pressed. If it show at least one digg, people will digg it up, but if I don't digg my articles one time, they'll go for days without getting submitted and by then, most of the big traffic has passed. Digg needs to fix that. I guess I'll complain to them but I can't for the life of me imagine that a thousand other bloggers haven't already filed complaints.

[dalebert]

Oh wow. I just noticed something that seems new. It appears that someone DID submit a digg for my latest cartoon/article. However, they submitted a new did from the fake URL! So now my article is duplicated on Digg and the fake one (URL + pound sign) has way more diggs than the real one! haha. I was wondering why this week was getting so few diggs compared to recent ones. That explains it.

This URL has nine diggs (as of now)

http://anarchyinyourhead.com/2008/04/18/lack-of-faith-is-a-virtue/

and this URL has 21 (as of now)

http://anarchyinyourhead.com/2008/04/18/lack-of-faith-is-a-virtue/#more-147

See why Digg annoys the crap outta me?

[K. Darien Freeheart]

Oh wow. I just noticed something that seems new. It appears that someone DID submit a digg for my latest cartoon/article

It was probably me.

See why Digg annoys the crap outta me?

It's ironic actually that being a technical person, I've never noticed technical flaws (other than being dirt slow) with Digg. It would seem that they'd recognize that an anchor is the same as a file. Does it consider sites with variables to be different too? That could be kind of useful if it does, to track how articles are referrered. http://anarchyinyourhead.com/2008/04/18/lack-of-faith-is-a-virtue/?submitted_by=Dalebert is also the same page, but if Digg considers it a different one, it would allow you to track which ones you submit, for isntance, or WHERE the submission was frm (i.e. the "Digg this" on your page could pass a variable to inform you the Digg is coming from your site directly...

Any pound sign (#) in a URL just refers to a specific piece of text in that URL and causes the page to scroll down to it. [...] What's not logical is that digg now sees it as a separate URL...

This is true, but I understand why they would have the site consider it a new entry. Perhaps the submitter's goal was to draw attention to the comment and NOT the article itself.

Digg needs to fix that

The problem isn't Digg itself. This ties directly into why I hate Digg...

People.

I'm serious. I don't mind Digg technically, to me the entire premise is flawed. Digg is a democracy and as such, suffers all of the problems of democracy. When 90% of the population supports government, anti-government pages tend not to rise to the top, meaning that they're viewed by less and less people. I'm not exactly sure what the logic here is, but I've personally found I tend to hate anything popular. I'm not sure if this is chicken or egg exactly. I'm not sure if I hate things that are popular, or if being popular requires the introduction of certain qualities I dislike, but I've found that very few things are both popular AND appealing to me.

To tie this into your problem, Digg actually does have a "duplicate" checking feature. When I submitted the comic from your site, I went through the submission process and based on keywords and similarities in the page it suggested that "this item" might be the same thing. I then Dugg the other item rather than submitting a new one. I suspect that the VAST majority of people simply don't bother with this.

[dalebert]

But the exact same counter will show different numbers depending on how you get to the same page.

Anyway, I think I've addressed this the best I can for now. I've installed Sociable, an addon that automatically puts links in for digg, stumbleupon, and just about any other site I care about to every post. I won't be using the digg counter anymore. This may mean not as many people may digg my stuph because it's not quite as obvious and encouraging as a digg counter button, but I'm ok with that considering this will be remove so much tedium and inaccurate digg counters. Now people will have to click the digg link and digg it at the digg site that opens on a separate page instead of just clicking a button.