'Buried Stories Bin' + Alternative Sources

I posted a little while back on the still missing 'Buried Stories Bin' feature. After the successfulness of my alternative sources post, there was some really good feedback, so I spent some time brainstorming how to make it better. What I came up with combines both of these features so that they work together. Let me explain.

First, create the 'Buried Stories Bin' so that users can sift through these stories and find good information that may have been buried. The bin could just be a tab next to the upcoming stories or something:

Second, within the buried stories bin, stories have a couple new features. It would be necessary to list the reason the story was buried, as well as the new options available. This could look something like this:

Lastly, the key element of this is the options dropdown. Since the story is already buried as a duplicate, the question remains, "What should we as diggers do with this submitted link?" This is where the idea of alternative sources come in. Perhaps have the ability to suggest a buried story as an alternative source, because currently dupes are just wasted information. They can/should be utilized to supplement the original article...unless of course, it is the same exact source.

In the end, the 'Buried Stories Bin' would have more options than the one I suggested like the ability to revote it back to the front page if it was buried falsely. Maybe some peopel can suggest some good ideas here?

To Save or to Digg, That is the Question.

Ever notice a story whose server is down continue to get dugg? Ever been in a hurry and not had enough time to read a story that looks interesting? It seems like many people digg stories in order to bookmark them for later, which is an incorrect use of a 'digg'. To digg is to endorse, not to save. Thats why we need the ability to save a link for later. This is what it could look like:

Naturally, once you saved a story to look at later, you would be able to access them in your Saved folder or lockbox that can be accessed at http://digg.com/users/*yourusername*/saved. I took a poll and found that 100% of people polled wanted the ability to save stories for later. (don't worry that the poll only included myself)

Top 10 Most Dugg Stories (and how to find them yourself)

One of my firsts posts was some statistics regarding the top 50 stories of all time. It wasn't really about finding the top stories as much as the stats behind them, but nevertheless, I get referrals from people who are looking for the top dugg stories. Obviously people are interested, so I decided to list the Top 10 and show you how to find them on your own.

1. 13577 Diggs: New Digg v3 Launched
2. 11753 Diggs: Optimus Keyboard February 1st!
3. 10572 Diggs: THE Crocodile Man, Steve Irwin, is dead.
4. 9942 Diggs: Tired of prying eyes at work?
5. 9289 Diggs: Abusive New York Camera Store Threatens Blogger
6. 9097 Diggs: Simple Key Mod Makes Most All Current Locks Obsolete
7. 8158 Diggs: A new way to test your bandwidth (and it looks pretty cool too!)
8. 8038 Diggs: RIAA loses in file sharing case
9. 7825 Diggs: SkypeOut now FREE for US & Canada!
10. 7772 Diggs: Help Bring Back TechTV (buried)
(as of 9/20/06)

So now for the How to portion:
Step 1: Go to http://www.digg.com/search
Step 2: set advanced options as 'All Stories', 'From All Time', 'Sort By Most Diggs', and check 'include buried stories'
Step 3: search for http://
Step 4: hit search and voila!

700,000th Digger Joins the Digg Army

EDIT: Dan Huard just commented on my Digg submission saying that this number is not correct. My apologies.

Although I was unable to get an official count from Digg HQ, I used my tried and true method of trial and error to find out exactly how many users there were registered at Digg. Basically that consists of blocking user numbers hoping there is a corresponding user until I narrow it down to the exact number.

For those wondering who user 700,000 is, meet meihuanew who registered at about 1:58 pst.

Digg on.

Duplicate Stories Idea

Like everyone else, I don't like seeing the same thing I've already seen on the frontpage. DuggTrends posted an article on dupes and got me thinking about how to combat them.

My idea involves somewhat combining stories that deal with the same topic. Take the "Plane Crashed into an NYC Residential Building" that DuggTrends points out. Most of the stories come from different sources technically making them original stories. The only problem is that they are duplicate information. Why not allow people to add alternate sources to already submitted stories? Perhaps it could look something like this?



The result would be similar to Google News, which lists all the related links to the same story. When new information comes out regarding the story, a new story submission is warranted. Using the example above, the new story would have been "Pilot of NYC Plane Crash was Yankees Pitcher Cory Lidle".

I guess it all comes down to people wanting to get front page stories rather than trying to contribute to whatever social news community they prefer.

Edit: After some good feedback, I thought I would add to the idea by having a similar feature to comments whereby users can vote the sources up and down. Like so:

What Makes a Top Contributor?

I was over at Netscape today when I became intrigued by the "Top Contributor" box. Curious as to what makes one a "Top Contributor", I looked closer and came up with some surprising stats. Here is what I found:

Looking at the data it is quite easy to come to a conclusion about one thing; that there is a difference between submitters and contributers. In my mind a contributer would be someone that contributes to the community of Netscape, and not necessarily someone that submits many stories. As you can see above, some users submit a large number of stories but have terrible homepage ratios. With the same data it is possible to also recognize that the users with better homepage ratios tend to be the ones actively commenting on stories.

In my opinion, the users with higher homepage ratios seem to submit less stories, but obviously higher quality ones. The users with low homepage ratios probably submit anything that isn't already submitted hoping to get lucky. Of course I didn't research that, but I'd guess its pretty true.

I hope that is somewhat enlightening to someone.

Feature Request: Polling

I don't know much about anything, but what I do know is that I like polls. Just as users submit new stories, users could also make up poll questions which would be available for the masses to vote on. For instance:



Of course, only heavily voted on polls would make it to the front page. But it could be an interesting tool to find out how people feel about a certain topic.

Similarly, quizzes would also be an interesting feature offering multiple choices, rather than just a simple 'yea' or 'nay'. I'll save you the heartache of another paint image by leaving this one up to your imagination.