A lame ass entity called ZeroPaid steals it, hypes it with a sexier title and a bunch of digg lingo (as well as copy and pasted letter and other uncredited text by Michale) and it goes to the front page. The item links thru to a ZeroPaid page with tons of internal links and nothing to Michael’s original page.

Kevin summed it all up well: http://www.feedblog.org/2006/12/rewriting_histo.html

The reason they have comments is so the jack-booted 19 year olds that feel like they run the site can post their gabble to each other like some modern bathroom wall. Seriously shouldn’t there be a place for people that have never contributed anything other than voting on a link have a place to feel special about themselves ;>

while I agree with you Allen and I have given for the most part even using digg for anything other than finding podcasts.

my problem is the rampant fanboys and rude children on there.

I like apple but I don’t want to read about some guy who changes from developing on windows to apple. This story gets to the front page purely by the title. If you want a front page story go pro apple and anti Ms. As for the comments, some idiot gave me a hard time for spelling MAC in caps…

If you didn’t have comments on there I think there would be a lack of community (if you can call it that).

Does it seem elitist? Yes.
Does your site get touched directly by people reading your content (from somewhere else, no less)? No.

I have no other interpretation worth mentioning except that I am a Digg user, and I have come here to encourage you (hopefully with the simplicity of presence); some of us like directly dealing with content and the providers there-of. Digg wouldn’t be a useless tool without content, but as it is it is tremendously useful with the content that even you as a dissenter provide here.

* 50+ comments on digg
* 30+ comments on Search Engine Journal
* 1 comment on CenterNetworks
* 0 comments on William’s blog

There are several issues here. First of all you wrote an anti-Digg article. The Digg community can be rather self-involved (try submitting anything pro-Digg, or anything at all mentioning Kevin Rose) and hostile to criticism. That is understandable to a degree, and that is why your article was marked as lame (similar reasons why most of my objective analysis, whenever critical of Digg, is marked as lame)

Also, I have been looking at a way to transfer comments from the social bookmarking sites to the original posts as well. I think it would help with the continuity of the conversation both on sites like Digg as well as the blog post where the content originated.

While I agree that all the comments should be on the blog post, I don’t think that Digg should be exempt from the comments. That just takes away from the social nature of the site. All the comments should be available on both sites, and perhaps Digg should facilitate site owners in that regard.

Thanks for the follow up.

For the record, I was the person that submitted Loren’s article to Digg. I tried submitting Allen’s first but it had already been submitted and buried. I thought this issue was quite interesting and needed to get more attention so I submitted Loren’s article.

Allen, I am a bit divided on the whole issue of including Digg in the search results but I agree that this issue (one of duplicate submissions or second hand postings) is one that Digg needs to crack down on. When you go to submit a story again under a different url, they say hey you might be duplicating a submission, but all you have to do is ignore it and submit away.

Allen, no offence, but until ten minutes ago I had no idea your site existed. I’ll hazard a guess that the majority of the Digg community falls into the same category. For me, Digg is where I do the talking – except on some occasions.

All this adds up to Digg’s advantage in this area: it has a large centralised community, immediately invites discussion on topics (which is also a reason why Loren’s post attracted comments), and an excellent rank-based comments system.

Surely there’s a way you can roll with Digg? If not, I guess you have to accept that, like Canute, there’s no way to roll back the tide.

I hate to break it to you, but Digg is not put together to benefit your site. The Digg owners I’m sure are happy that they get the comments and you don’t. Don’t like Digg linking to your site? Then block any traffic from your site that comes from Digg. It’s technically quite easy to do and you’ll quickly find if anyone does Digg your site it will not likely get to the front page because nobody else will be able to follow the link. I enjoy the Digg comments and am glad they are there. The masses have spoken. Digg is a winner, comments included.

I’d not be on your site (never heard of it) if it wasn’t for Digg and I doubt I’m alone. So pardon my lack of sympathy, but it’s not Digg’s problem if you don’t like how the web is evolving.

Let the best product win, Digg or otherwise.