Dear Kevin Rose,

As a long-time member of what has now become known as the Internet I have seen many websites come and go over the past 20 years. Some deserved to die out while others died well before their time. In all of my years I have never seen a website that needed to fail as much as Digg.com does.

There are literally hundreds of reasons why I hate Digg, but here are the main points of interest that you should consider:

1. Blog spam. I have never seen any website which is more conductive to spam than Digg is. Hardly a day goes by that you are not bombarded with a website that uses excessive pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials, and flash (not to mention the 101 different “contextual” advertising programs). Of course, these blogs don’t actually offer any substantial content: they are simply one or two paragraph entries about a news article on another website (although most of them don’t even bother linking to their cited source).
2. Marketdroids. Nearly ever headline is written by some marketdroid, and they all follow the same formula: CAPITAL LETTERS + “free/rumor/news/breaking” + abuse of exclamation points = instant front page story. Oh, and lets not forget the lack of any self-editing by your legion of 16-year old submitters.
3. DDoS. Digg is, really, nothing more than a Distributed Denial of Service attack. By linking to a website you end up costing the owner more money than the site normally takes to maintain. Thus, small website owners are hurt, and Digg users are forced to use half-assed third-party services that mirror websites (which, by the way, costs website owners valuable advertising revenue, and some of these mirrors actually place their own ads in content that they have no legal right to be mirroring in the first place).
4. No real conversation. Digg doesn’t really allow for a conversation between its members. Of course, since its members are half-retarded ADHD children it’s a wonder Digg’s members know how to type at all.
5. The broken algorithm. Your algorithm for selecting which storied make it past the “upcoming stories” section and on to the main page is, simply put, broken. Marketers have figured out how, in a time of high-submission volume, to get their stories “Dugg” by 40 or so people and have it magically appear on the front page. Sure, they pay good money to have this happen, but it’s broken nevertheless.
6. Changing templates. Listen, I don’t know what kind of ADHD-riddled audience you serve, but would you please stop changing the layout of your website every 3 months? Shit, man, pick a fucking layout and stick with it for a year or so. I’m sick and tired of having to re-locate your navigation bar every time you jackasses feel like coding a new frontend. “User friendly” does not mean “make users, who are already comfortable with navigation, learn something new.”

Tags: digg sucks, kevin rose, shooting myself in the foot