The recent controversy about changes to the digg.com story promotion algorithm has primarily focused on spreading out who can promote stories to the front page. I think this approach neglects a much bigger problem with the site: Linkjacked content. To remedy this, I propose a new bury function: Linkjacked.
The front page of Digg.com these days has a dearth of fresh new sites. There are almost always linkjacked posts to the same tired sites rehashing other people’s content with a catchy headline. One site that does this on a regular basis is crooksandliars.com. A search of front page stories (including buried submissions) reveals that of their last 10 front page articles, three were deemed inaccurate by the community at large.
Accuracy issues aside, the first article on the list is a piece re-capping two articles. There are approximately 100 words in the article, of which 1/3 are block quotes. This article received over 1000 diggs, by most measures a fairly effective linkbait piece – yet there is nothing to the article. Are the honest people at crooksandliars.com the ones promoting these stories? I can’t say for certain, but I don’t think I’d be going out on a limb saying that most likely they are. That “article” probably took the “author” no more than 10 minutes to linkjack and is adding very little useful content. At some point Digg’s quest for pageviews must weigh the possibility of user fatigue.
