Lots of people are down on Digg.com, as I’ve pointed out before. I’m not going to mention them by name (cough, Umair, cough) but they have their reasons – which seem to revolve around Digg being a kind of trailer-park version of social bookmarking, filled with “pimply teenagers.”
Whatever. I for one love to sit and watch the stuff scroll by on Digg/Spy. The only thing that really bugs me about Digg is that Kevin Rose and his partner Jay Adelson look like they are both about 15 years old.
But enough about that. Digg has just added a great new feature – not to the regular part of the site, where you “digg” stories to vote them higher or lower, but to the comments. In effect, you can now “digg” comments too, to vote them higher or push them down lower. And when you’re reading, you can choose whether you want to see all the comments, or only the ones that have been “dugg” a certain number of times.
This approach is not new, as many people over at Slashdot will likely point out. The tech discussion site has had similar features from inception, which allow registered users to moderate or “mod” comments based on whether they are useful or not. And as Eric Berlin has pointed out in the comments on this post, Reddit.com has a similar feature. This type of self-policing comment function is something that we’ve been considering at globeandmail.com, where we were one of the first Canadian news sites to allow reader comments. And in my opinion this kind of thing makes Digg.com even more useful. Sorry, Umair.