5 Things Digg must do to Prevent SPAM

Recently a Pay per Digg site called User/Submitter was launched and so far almost every single story submitted through User/Submitter has made it to the frontpage. While this is definitely taking the integrity of digg down to a great extent but there is something that digg can do to prevent large scale spam…

• Cache the stories that make it to the homepage

Basically this means that a user is not shown the original entry but is shown a cached version of the story. This one step will control spam to a great extent, because of the element of traffic present here i.e. the Original website is not going to get loads of visitors anymore.

• Make the Algorithms tougher to crack

Now this can be tricky. Maybe digg can have a completely different algorithm to rank stories and digg should keep updating it all the time just like Google does so that it becomes even tougher for a story that is spam to make it to the homepage.

• Do not Allow Users to Digg from their site

This has to be prevented somehow. All these spam stories are not dugg from the digg site but are actually dugg by the spammers from somewhere else. If this can be stopped people will to open many pages so as to digg. So basically even spamming takes time and is not that easy for large scale spamming.

• Referrer Blocks

Now digg needs to identify sites like User/Submitter and make sure that users coming from that site are not able to digg any stories. This can be really very effective in curbing spam.

• Give more control to the users

The existing system is effective enough but there is just one thing that digg needs to do. It would be better if digg shows how many people have marked a particular story as spam and why have they done so. This would in turn create a greater awareness among the digg community, and also it would be better if digg allows us to mark a user as a spammer.

With all these changes in place, I think people will find it even more difficult to game digg. Hoping that digg remains a place to find new and interesting stuff