For those of you who don’t know. Digg.com is a site where users submit stories and other users vote in favor of them to decide what is front-page worthy news.

The Digg community has been talking about the need for a new digging algorithm that is used to promote stories to the front page for some time now. There have been several articles about this. Surely, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s damn near impossible to get a 'popular ratio' anywhere near 50% with a thousand or so submits. This obviously doesn’t count when you are one of the founders for the site, such as Kevin Rose. After all, Kevin drinks beer with the-other-guy-from-the-screen-savers (I'm kidding, Alex is funny :)) and talks about his own website on a weekly-ish basis via his own popular downloadable show called “diggnation”. Even people who hate Kevin Rose have to at least realize the significance of being able to pull that off. No wonder everyone Diggs him. =P Anyway, back to the topic at hand, the site’s misuse by a certain segment of Digg users. . .

A few days ago I was just checking my RSS feed for digg.com and a certain story caught my eye. I thought I had somehow seen it before, perhaps on another site? Well, it turns out I had seen this site talked about in a forum. On that forum, the site admin was talking to a bunch of users about what company to hire to drive users to the site. One user suggested Digg, and he joked that he could get way more people to his site for half the amount of money instantly. I thought nothing of it until I saw the Digg.com top news stories.

As it turns out, the user on the forum had an extremely similar nickname to the guy who submitted the article. I thought to myself, you know what, that doesn’t surprise me in the least. Oddly enough, I went back to the forum that night to see the thread, and it had been deleted. I won’t say what the Digg user name is because there is honestly nothing Digg can do about it. Even if he is banned from the site, his group of friends will surely pick up the slack. Plus, I doubt he is the only one who decided to do this. And please don’t ask what story it was because I don’t want that website owner getting hassled either. I will say that as of writing this post, the guilty Digg'r is among the top 15 users sorted by “popularity”. Not too surprising I hope?

Rest assured, this post isn’t about going on a witch-hunt. It is meant to be even more “proof” that the site is in dire need of improvements. Unfortunately, I can’t prove this now because the forum post has been deleted. Some might be thinking. . .so what? True, it may not be the worst news you’ve heard this week. (The Arizona Cardinal fans' pillows are probably still damp from Monday night) But this type of Digg abuse is clearly unacceptable. I am glad Kevin Rose talked about fixing the Digging system to prevent abuse, but it seriously needs to happen soon.