Monday, July 14, 2008

Open Letter to Digg

I wanted to title this post, "Five Things That I Want Digg to Make a Reality", but I figured that might imply that they would start making crap in the real world. Not good. So in true cinematic style, here.....we....go....:

1. Make all submissions anonymous before they reach the front page. Once they hit the FP, then the submitters name will be shown. While there will always be a social hierarchy topped by Digg power users, making the submissions anonymous in upcoming will allow some more inexperienced users' submissions to be given some light.

2. Make the shout inbox more user-friendly. I'm pretty tired of taking 30 minutes to an hour cleaning out my shouts. I'm sure some people don't get to them, and others have a lot more in a day, but a "Delete All" button or a way to visually separate fans/friends, upcoming/popular, and others could be a lot more helpful.

3. Now, I'm no xenophobe, but when I get shouts, friend requests, and see submissions from people from different countries I can't help but notice that the majority of their content is hard to read, spam, and shouted to me about 100 times. This is not limited to foreign countries (I'm in the US) and I'm positive we have our fair share of spammers.

4. Ever get those messages to slow down and take a breath before you comment or shout again? That's fair enough, I guess, but when I shout to 101 people, and I don't know because there's no friend counter, and it tells me that...it's annoying. A shout counter/friend counter would be useful for sure.

5. Finally...I want to know what stuff of mine that my friends Digg. If I have friends that digg nothing of mine, but shout me 5 times a day, it'll be faster/easier to delete them if I knew that beforehand. There are sites that do this, but I lose them or they don't really work well.

*6. Why doesn't Kevin Rose ever accept my friend request?

Tell me what you think in the comments...

2 comments:

Thom Mattson said...

One more key feature needed: a button to digg the Top Stories on right side of the front page.

Alex said...

Very good point, that would be really useful!