Reading through the dig all section of digg.com gives reminds me of why editors will never be out of work.

Digg, for anyone that hasn’t sampled it’s user provided and voted on content, provides a venue for people to submit stories. After submission, they’re voted on by the readership and promoted, ostensibly, based on merit. At least one would assume so at first glance.

What I’ve noticed is that stories tend to float to the top based on the whims of the people reading the dig all section of the site. These same people don’t seem to represent a large quantity of the readership, although for all I know it’s an adequate cross section.

Stories tend to have either ultra high numbers of votes (if they’ve been voted to the main page) or very few votes (less than 20). I would expect more stories to be somewhere in the middle if an adequate amount of readers were looking at the “all” section. Instead there appears to be quite a bit of voting on the front page stories.. which is less than usefull.

Another problem with the format is lack of editing on the articles. While we all gripe about Slashdot (and Kuro5hin, and heck, even PCBurn) having some odd wording or poorly phrased frontpage copy at times, they’re a bit different from digg. They all take at least a minimum of effort to look over every story and clean up the verbage.. make it look presentable. Someone is there, editing down the stories so we can appreciate the information linked to or contained therein.

So while I’m not nieve enough to think that there’s no place for a resource like Digg on the web, I’m also not in fear of it replacing proper editors anytime soon. Bring on the editors!