Recently The Mu Life Blog published The State of the Digg, a rant on duplicate story submissions on digg.

I think diggsters love duplicates. Here are some recent stories that first went unnoticed but duplicates made it to the main page.

Link 1 | Link 2 | Time Difference : 2 Hours

Link 1 | Link 2 | Time Difference: 7 Hours

Link 1 | Link 2 | Time Difference : 3 Days

There are many more, just take a famous article and search for its title in digg. Every third time you will find that the story that made to the main page is duplicate.

Many interesting stories go down the drain due to lack of diggs, Big problems is power users walking over smaller users by resubmitting the same stories from different sources. Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s HomePage so the same thing when posted by a top digg user often make it to the main page. Sometimes people just don’t digg stories because the don’t like the story title. In my opinion time should generally be the main consideration.

Escape.is has written an article on solving the Digg dupe dilemma :

Since Digg knows what stories I digg and who else diggs those stories, then Digg should be able to recommend to me stories I have not reviewed, but might like. “Stories you may digg”. That should at least cut down on the duplicates since the system would actively push stories I may digg to me for review.*

A more immediate solution is to allow each user to set a preference to allow him to filter out stories containing urls duplicate to stories he has seen (although that may require an impractical amount of computing power).

Technorati Tags: digg, digg algorithm, the state of the digg, rant

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