Is Digg Broken Beyond Repair?

Let me start this off by saying that I really enjoy Digg and I hope that one day, just one of my articles will make it up onto their homepage.  That being said, I think there are some things about Digg that need to be addressed before the site becomes useless.

The other day while I was visiting Digg, it kind of dawned on me that I was always seeing the same user names on the homepage.  I know this isn’t exactly an epiphany because I’ve heard many other people say the same thing, but I kind of either blew off the idea or just didn’t give it much thought.

If you look at Digg’s homepage over the course of three or four days, you’ll probably end up seeing between 25 and 30 users who dominate the homepage.  Seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me if Digg’s “top” 25 users accounted for 70% of what ends up on the homepage – meaning that us little guys have very little chance of making it up onto the homepage, no matter how good our articles are or how funny/creative/useful our submission titles and summaries are.

This leads me to believe that Digg is more like a high school social clique than it is the user driven news submission site it claims to be.

Does this mean that Digg is useless and we shouldn’t visit or submit articles to it?  Absolutely not.  I still think Digg is a great way to get traffic to your sites and overall is a great resource when you’re trying to find relevant topics to write about.  However, it still needs to be fixed.

To that end, I have come up with a couple of ways that us small users can take back Digg and force changes so that everyone has a fair shot of getting up onto the homepage:

1. Reverse Digg.  What I mean by this is vote for all of the crappy, irrelevant spam sites and not for the sites submitted by the “power users.”  I think this will help in one of two ways: 1) it will force Digg to come up with a more stringent process for submission (having your site pre-approved for example) and 2) if Digg is afraid that spam sites will make it up onto the homepage, they’ll probably be more willing to cater less the “power users.”
2. Don’t vote.  Continue to use Digg, read the stories, etc., however don’t vote for anything.  If nobody votes, nothing gets to the homepage.
3. Create alliances.  Try and find other disenchanted and disenfranchised Digg users and create a strategic alliance and vote only for each others’ submissions.  If you can put together a group of 50 or 60 users (which I don’t think would be that difficult) you all stand a pretty good shot of making it up onto the homepage.
4. Stop submitting to Digg.  If you’re really pissed with not ever getting up onto the homepage, stop submitting to Digg.  It seems to me that blogs and other small websites make up a pretty good majority of what’s submitted to Digg.  If all of a sudden the well goes dry, Digg’s going to have to change their stance on who gets up onto the homepage.  There are plenty of other sites (Shoutwire, Fark, Reddit, Netscape, etc.) what will make up for the loss in traffic.

Anyway, these are just a couple of ways I think us small guys can help to force Digg to share the wealth and not take us for granted.  

On that note, don’t forget to Digg this!