Digg is very good at giving me the most popular content on the web. Since its inception this content included news, flash games, images, videos, podcast episodes, lists, how to, and articles.

The idea behind digg is that the news is user approved (not editor approved). But there are some aspects of digg that remain under single user control. Here are the list of aspects that are under multi-user control and single-user control.

multi-user control

• podcasts
• stories
• comments

single-user control

• story category
• story title
• story link
• story description

All of the single-user controlled items can be converted to multi-user controlled. Here’s how…

Story Category:

When a story is submitted it’s up to the submitter to pick the category. This is problematic. If the submitter misunderstood the article or simply picked a bad category. This can be solved by getting the user’s feedback when they select bury>wrong topic. Digg can ask the user which topic the story belongs in.

Once the Wrong Topic bury is clicked, the suggest category box could look like this

Then if the system gets enough votes, the stories topic will be changed.

Story Title:

The story title on digg is often misspelled, misleading, incorrect grammar, or just incorrect. In digg’s case the power of the people should be used again. The story can have an edit icon next to each title. When the edit button is clicked the title is replaced with a text box that has suggest features.

The user clicks on the small pencil to the right of the title.

Story Links:

Story links are sometimes direct links that go straight to the story described. Most of the time links are broken, down, or blog spam.

The best link can be suggested just like the best title. When you click the edit link button a text box with an suggest feature will appear.

This will cut back on people posting the links in the comments.

Story Description:

Now the story description is a little bit tougher. Because of the length of the description it would be impracticable to do the same as the link and the title. So my suggestion is this.

When a story is submitted the description that the user puts in will become the first comment of the story. So this comment will remain the story’s description as long as it is the most dugg comment. When another user submits a comment and gets dugg up, then that comment will become the description

Summary:

Digg became a fun and unique site because of the control it gave to all of the users. Not all aspects are up to multiple users.

The category, title, link, and description can be updated to benefit from the masses.