Digg is a democracy. Anyone can submit a story and depending on the votes it gets it is promoted to a featured story. So in theory the main page should contain all the good stuff on the net.

But reality is quite different. I admit there are good stories, but many stories are cooked up fake stories and contains no stuff at all. Another problem is that the site linked to is not the original source and hence is a waste of time.

I think the main problem with Digg is the underlying difference between individuals. Some are good at evaluating good stuff while a big majority just follows whatever is shown to them. Hence many of the votes are cast without even reading the item linked to! So getting your story a lot of diggs is simple enough if you have a couple of IDs. If your story got 10 diggs, you will get another 10 from the “follower” population.

I think majority of diggers are teenagers. This is reflected in the story comments. Sometimes I think “What! is this comment made by a mental patient?” Here is a sample comment I got from the Digg front page (I am not talking about buried comments!),

“That guys browser looks like ass, as a web developer that kinda shit makes me kringe”

Obviously reading through the comments without the profanity filter is not recommended.

The only solution to this problem seems to be enabling some kind of moderation on the site. For example, penalizing nonsense stories heavily and rewarding good stories with a lot of Karma. I know it is probably too much of a work for Digg, but they can outsource the moderation to some of the existing top diggers. Needless to say the moderators themselves needs to be moderated by Digg