Digg, a social bookmarking site, was once a great place. It was a place where someone could write an article, find a photo, or discover something new, and then share it with the web. It is no longer that place. It is now dominated by power users, a group of users that control the digging environment.

What happened to Digg?

The submissions of a Digg power user

Digg was once a place that was fair. Everyone had a chance of submitting a quality link and then rising to the top. What happened, over time, is that this equal oppurtunity faded. The top stories were now being supplied by a smaller group of users – know as Digg power users. These users have a large amount of submissions – probably in the thousands, with a large amount of them, especially the recent ones, hitting the front page.

So what does this mean to you? It means that your submissions, although they could be more interesting than the submissions of power users, won’t hit the front page. Does this make sense? No. Is this fair? Not at all. Digg should be of equal oppurtunity, and it should reflect what the users like most, not what the power users submit.

How you can fix this

Fixing this will require help from every ordinary Digg user. There won’t be any action from the Digg administration (what can they do?), so we all have to lend a hand.

A few of the top submissions on Digg

First, you can bury content that isn’t worth the front page. There are always a link or two that obviously only made it to the front page because it was submitted by a power user. This can only help so much. There will always be the users than will digg content even if it is pointless.

Second,  try to digg content from normal users. If we start to bring up the normal users, and then follow step one and bring down the power users, Digg will be fair again. Trust me – there are plenty of links on Digg from normal users that are great stuff, but they just never hit the front page. And remember the first time that you hit the front page (if you have yet). It’s a great feeling.

If all else fails, there are plenty of other sites similar to Digg out there. One that I suggest is Mixx. Mixx has everything Digg has: a clean interface, full features, etc, minus the corruption.