Digg – the social news network experienced a trouble earlier this month, when it went to censor some ‘unwanted codes’. But soon, it learnt and apologized that it is doing injustice to the very own thing that makes Digg, a special over other news sites.

When you give the power to users (based on which social web is built), you are bound to expect such problems as we have seen with youtube, flickr and lately Digg. But, the problem for Digg creators come in a different way.

Heard of this story? You can buy digg votes and you can make a lame story to the front page of Digg. It will cost just $100. There are lot of such “Gangs of Digg” popping up.

Now, what is the solution?

One: Secret Ballot
The voting of stories can be based on a “secret ballot” system. That is , the news stories will not show up the name of the submitter for certain period of time or till a certain count votes is reached. This will reduce the “you-digg-mine-i-will-digg-yours” menace.

The stories will be voted based only on its merit not based on the person who submitted it.

Two:Rate the users
You have to classify the users as expert, good and suspicious voters. Based on the stories submitted, stories dugg, give each user some karma points and classify them as good or bad (similar to the ‘popular story ratio’) behaviour people. This karma points should not be made public but, will be made use to detect suspicious spam stories.

And you can grant the reviewing permission to these valuable users who can eliminate the spam stories and the persons who submit them.

Three: Variable Vote
Flickr takes this approach in their ‘interestingness algorithm’, Digg can take a leaf too. Each digg or vote is now has the same value. Instead, the votes from the users with “good karma points” will rate higher than the votes of normal user. Similar way, the votes for burial can be variables.

We certainly know that the above 3 simple steps completely solve the problem in hand. But, lot of thinking needs to go to attempt to solve this.

What do you think?

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