1) Digg is a democracy: in point of fact there is a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes on with regards to upcoming stories making the front page of Digg. The algorithms of Digg are designed to enable newer users and new sites to frontpage more easily. However, the flipside is: new users on and sites submitted to Digg are watched more closely as possible spam. Further, there are even “secret editors” (Digg employees) that make final decisions on some content and who might choose to promote something (or not) for unknown reasons.

2) Digg is completely corrupt: while some users come in with rose-colored glasses others come in with huge skepticism about the Digg voting and promoting systems. Anything as extreme as “completely corrupt” is, as you might have guessed, going to far. Sure there is corruption but there are also checks and balances in the form of Digg’s algorithm, manual bury features (including a “bury as spam” option) and Digg’s secret editors.

3) Digg is all about who you know: there is definitely an element of trust when it comes to veteran Diggers submitting content. However, a completely new user could frontpage their first story if it were completely exciting, extremely original or breaking news. Another way to break in as a new user without many “Digg friends” is to watch the RSS feeds of top sites like Ars Technica that have a huge following – you can then “piggy-back” off the popularity of the site.

These are just a few, really, and my final advice would be: seek out someone who knows the ropes on Digg and ask them what’s what. Honestly, at first (at least for me) the idea of approaching a veteran user was a wee bit frightening, but looking back on it any one of a number of top users would have been happy to answer questions related to Digg.

Still, today, I see the bigger picture and the algorithmic changes aren’t going to do what Digg wants – they aren’t going to give the newer or less frequent Digg users more of a chance, and here are some of the reasons why:

1) Veteran users get a lot of stories to the front page with good reason: they are trusted by others to submit top content from around the internet on a variety of subjects. This trust is built up over time. It is only natural that users who submit and participate more will have higher quality submissions worthy of the front page.

2) Spammers can easily fill the void when veteran Digger submissions can no longer rise to the top. In fact, they can do so with much less effort since their submissions require fewer votes to succeed.

3) With blocks to top Diggers they are forced to result to the same tactics spammers use: mass shouting, begging for Diggs, submitting only the craziest and most offbeat content. This simultaneously lowers the bar on quality content while also forcing quality users to work harder and arguably less ethically to get good content to the front page of Digg.

At the end of the day, we have seen the introduction of shouts and algorithm changes that have resulted in more and more poor content reaching the front page of Digg. Worse yet, quality submitters like CosmikDebris (who specializes in scientific and space-related links) suffer from low frontpage ratios because their content – while very interesting, newsworthy and educational simply isn’t sensational enough to compete with shout-spammers who focus primarily on offbeat news. This isn’t about top Diggers having their egos bruised, it is about people who invest time and effort to bring good content to all Digg users having their hands tied and about the mainstream everyday Digg reader seeing worse and worse stories on the front page.

There are of course other issues at hand right now and many of them are longstanding. The infamous autobury list remains in full effect and Digg’s creators remain in full denial despite the overwhelming evidence (it kind of reminds me of creationists denying fossils). Top users still remain banned for unknown reasons. Many other users have simply left Digg because of all of the uproar. Digg’s Alexa stats are suffering and frankly if they don’t work out a serious overhaul soon they will be vulnerable when the Next Big Thing comes along.

Then I noticed that 6 of the 10 hottest stories on all of Digg were related to the iPhone. Is this really necessary? Isn’t there some Apple blog or something where people who actually care can go read about their precious iPhones? I mean sure, it’s an interesting device, and I’m game to hear updates about it occassionally even if I can’t afford one. Still, I don’t need to see it plastered all over one of the social media sites I frequent. /rant

The first of these was fairly contentious (and perhaps poorly phrased), and was buried right upon hitting the front page. It concerned a Digg feature that would help both Diggers and site owners, but the headline was phrased in such a way that Diggers thought it was an attack on Digg. Oh well!

The next post did extremely well, and concerned unusually legal street art – something entertaining and rather broadly interesting and appealing. An apparently misleading article (which I didn’t know at the time) about iPhones wearing out in a few months made number three. A nice post on website design simplicity unfortunatly crashed the target site. People did, in fact, rally behind my call-to-action to save a cool website from a negative change.

Surpringly (to me at least) a fairly entertaining picture collection of tree porn was buried shortly after becoming popular. A nice abandonment photo set on a newer blog did quite well – probably in part because the pictures were original and the story personal. Some Diggers didn’t read the headline on this article, and were disappointed – but it delivered exactly what the headline said: a brilliantly simple and cheap guerilla marketing strategy.

Who could disagree with an article on subversive and illegal guerilla gardening? Apparently other people agree with me that ads on YouTube videos are going too far. If you want to see my most recent top story check this page and vote it up if you like it!

(5) This post about Ask, Google and Google-Sux got some attention mostly because I bashed a site, and its administrator came back at me guns blazing. However, their counterarguments got shut down pretty fast. In reality, I think it was the comments that drew more attention than the post.

(4) This post about the huge scandal about LiveLeak not being indexed by Google drew a lot of readership, though much of it was from a Spanish site I never was able to decipher!

(3) Of course, one of the biggest AllSux targets has been Digg.com – and this story that followed the huge Digg scandal was the most popular of them all. While other blogs (and major news sites like Wired) were confused, I stayed up all night and summarized what was going on.

(2) The Technorati experiment had a huge readership. I think that a lot of people are interested in the deeper consequences of using social networks, and this post struck a cord with folks.

(1) Of course the most visited page on AllSux is Allsux! That bodes well for this and my other (newer) blog, because it means that there are a lot of readers who want to see the lates and greatest, and don’t just show up to read a single post and leave. Thanks to you all – keep visiting, reading, and please leave comments! Also visit this new blog I’m helping develop: WebUrbanist.com.

An honorable mention goes to all of the articles on AllSux about Helium. Though none of these pages have individually made the top five, they have cumulatively done amazingly well. Why? Because other frustrated Helium writers keep finding them and sending me words of support as well as their own stories bout Helium.