This is the story of how one Digg reader used one of my posts from this blog 24 hours after I published it and got 2600+ Diggs and counting.

EDIT: The Digg article now includes a link to my original article

Now before I continue I would like to mention this is NOT a rant, I am posting this simply to open some questions on how Digg works/should work. Perhaps this will lead to answers that will improve the Digg system.

Here is what happened:

On March 3rd I posted this: Real Life Beavis story on Digg.com

A few hours later I submitted it to Digg because i thought it may amuse the Digg readers. The story got around 12 Diggs and didn’t really get a whole lot of attention.

The article was mentioned on a few forums and then amazingly an almost exact replica of the article was posted on another blog and submitted to Digg. Replica article posted on Digg.com

Within a few hours the replica article was on the main page and at the time of writing it has 2673 Diggs.

Now I will stress once again that I am NOT complaining or getting upset. It is simply a photo and the fact that I noticed that he looked like Beavis, it is hardly the cure to cancer! But there are some genuine questions that may be worth looking at with this scenario.

1) Since posting my article THREE almost identical replicas have been posted on Digg. The authors of these articles must have seen that this story had already been mentioned on Digg, but they submitted anyway. Is this something that Digg could prevent in the near future?

2) After seeing this case study would other webmasters be inclined to just copy articles and hope that they get thousands of Digg votes?

3) Are there any other measures that could be taken to prevent stories from being posted multiple times?

4) Why was his story Dugg 2700+ times and mine only 12?

I believe from a Digg users persepctive the first three questions are the most important, but from a webmasters perspective the 4th question is a BIG question.

I have some theories on this:

a) This site is a marketing site, I have heard that Digg users are weary of such sites.
b) Perhaps his title & description was better than mine?
c) Perhaps he posted at a peak time?
d) He is a more active user of Digg than I am. Could this be the main reason?

Perhaps he wrote a better title than I did? so let’s have a look at the titles that we used:

MY TITLE: Real Life Beavis Found in America (Photo Included)
HIS TITLE: Arrested man looks like Beavis

I would be keen to hear from the Digg users which title they would be more inclined to click on? which is more accurate? what other factors do they look for in a good title?

Here are the descriptions we used:

MY DESCRIPTION: Ever wondered what happened to Beavis from Beavis & Butthead? It seems he was arrested recently in America.
HIS DESCRIPTION: This guy looks exactly like Beavis from Beavis & Butthead!

His title and description seems more to the point than mine, but I think mine are more informative and interesting. Am I wrong?

This example certainly raises some issues for the Digg community though, can a more active user copy stories from newer Digg users and take all the credit? Why have people been able to post the exact same story so many times? What could Digg and the Digg users do to keep future stories from being re-submitted so often?

I am a big fan of Digg and I was unsure whether or not to even publish this article, I don’t want to be seen as whining, like the title says “On Digg.com 2nd place is the 1st loser”, but if this article helps improve the quality of future Digg.com articles then it was worth the time.