codyg1985’s Think Tank

Digg, the technology-oriented social bookmarking website, is about to expand its horizons to include more general subject matters, such as world news, entertainment news, and financial news. The changes will occur in about a month.

Personally, I think this move was inevitable with the increasing popularity of the website. Digg is already a forefront in tech news, and other websites that mock the Digg concept have been launched that cover more general topics. The new Digg format will do for regular news what Digg has done for technology news.

With that said, as some have commented on the item on Digg, the expanded discussion of more personal issues, especially political and religious discussion, could lead to alienation of some users of the website that would normally participate. As a result, the popularity of Digg could go down as the base users flock to another website for technology news.

Some suggest that political discussion be separted from other discussion, and I agree with that sentiment. Political discussions can get ugly in a hurry, and those discussions can pit normally friendly users of Digg against each other in a verbal battle royale. There is no need to tarnish Digg and its reputation with such discussion, at least not on the front page of the website.

If political items are allowed to mingle alongside other news items, strict enforcement should be used to make sure that submitted political items to be dugg are not inflammatory or link to blogs. Further, the text of the submitted item should be heavily screened to keep out submissions that are partisan in nature, or contain certain flame words that incite flame wars.

With all of this said, Digg users bury lame stories quickly so that items that are sure to cause a problem do not appear on the front page. I can probably say that the same will hold true for political and religious discussion. Whether or not that will be the case, I think that different sections should be established to keep things from getting out of control.