Kuro5hin has a lengthy article on the shortcomings of Digg. I will not debate their points about the user base being worthless, and I will not go into the sociological aspects of the story.

But I must point out that the author of the article is simply not competent enough to write about the technical side of how Digg works. Digg is a complex system and thinking you can dismiss “The Digg Algorithm” - as it’s called in the article - by glancing over Digg a couple of times, you’re wrong. Subsequently, no one who actually knows something about the inner workings of Digg will take the rest of your article seriously.

I’ll go over a couple of bigger errors, misconceptions and oversimplifications in the article and point where Kuro5hin is most blatantly wrong. (Although a full analysis of this huge article and all of its errors would take many thousands of characters to write).

1st quote:

“When one submits a story to Digg, it first shows its head in the list of upcoming stories. If it doesn’t get 15 to 20 diggs in its first half hour … then it’s doomed to drift to the dark depths of a sea of Playboy spam” and “Digg’s initial stage of screening conveniently obliterates any chance a submission has of gradually gaining popularity through word-of-mouth; if you can’t grab the attention of a dozen jaded Diggers within a few minutes, you’ll be ignored.“

This is completely and utterly wrong. As an active submitter and Digg user who - if the top diggers list were still in place - would be in the top 1000 users, I know that this is simply not true. Sometimes a story will get only 5-6 votes in the first hour, but it will gradually grow to 20-30 in the first 10 or 15 hours, and this will be enough for a front page. Sometimes it will get 15 votes in the first half an hour and never get to front page. I can only point the author to my in-depth article on the life-cycle of a story on Digg, where the entire process is described to the best of my ability (I am in no way associated with Digg, and my data is based only on thorough observation)

2nd quote:

“You can get away with fewer diggs if you’re quick about it; TDATM takes into account the rate of digging, so a submission with 60 diggs secured in just one hour has about the same chance as one with 300 or 400 diggs over six hours.“

This quote illustrates the blatant ignorance from the author. I’m not entirely sure what he meant by this, but let’s just say that when a story is at 300 or 400 diggs it doesn’t have or need a “chance” - it’s already on the front page.

3rd quote:

“Worse, HTML tags are allowed in neither submissions’ descriptions nor their comments, so it’s impossible to link to other web pages to provide sources or references.“

Oh, I guess all those links in Digg comments are added by the fairies.

4th quote:

“Do you think it’s a coincidence that Digg (2.03 × 108 Google results) has: nearly 63 times as many Google results as our own venerable Kuro5hin (3.23 × 106 results), which permits a multitude of HTML tags in stories and comments? “

Err, maybe because Digg is a huge site with lots and lots of users, lots of traffic and lots of links? I can’t see how Digg, which has almost a million members and huge number of daily visits - surely more than Kuro5hin - can not have more Google results than Kuro5hin. It goes for most of the other examples in the article.

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I could go on. Some of the points of the article are valid, although in my opinion most - if not all - of them are overemphasized. However, the whole article is compromised by wrong info which it’s based upon. The simple rule of journalism applies here: if you don’t know what the hell you are talking about then either

a) leave the writing of the article to someone else
b) inform yourself thoroughly before writing a bunch of nonsense.