Richard MacManus writes about one of his frustrations with Digg – poorly created links that don’t give do a story justice. Once a particular link is added to Digg, there is no way for the submitter or anyone else to edit and improve it.
Sometimes this is done negligently or in a desire to post first; sometimes it is done maliciously to effectively block a story on Digg. Either way, it is an increasingly annoying problem for Digg users, and one that should be addressed. Too often, Digg’s data is crap.
Richard suggests giving some or all users the ability to edit links. He says he’s calling for editors, but not to pick stories. Rather, just to clean up existing stories to make them more accurate.
I like the idea a lot, and it’s something I’ve seen with a few other startups. Thoof, for example, which we wrote about last month, allows users to change any story in a wiki-like fashion. Changes are then voted on by the community to see if they stick or not.
Whether its power users, hired editors or the community at large, something should be done to fix the incentives for people to submit bad data to Digg. Good idea. Richard.