Digg Comment System is Retarded

Since its inception every aspect of Digg has gone through refinements, the vast majority of which have been good. This latest version of the comment system, however, is the most retarded thing I have ever seen. Usually comment systems are either what you call “flat”–meaning the comments are just posted in ascending order according to the date when the comment was posted, or they are “threaded”–meaning when someone responds to a comment, their comment is placed indented right below the comment to which the user was responding.

The folks at Digg have tried to keep some control over the way people post by limiting replying only to the top level comments (e.g. avoid infinite thread cascading)–which was good, but now it appears that posts are listed on the page only according to the number of diggs–positive or negative–a post may get. Here’s what this has amounted to:

• Replies to posts are scattered about and you never know who the person was responding to without doing a page search to find similar keywords.
• Posts are not rated based on whether they are good or well thought out, but rather on whether or not the person rating the comment agrees with what was said.
• Often the top rated comments are just jokes that barely relate to the topic at hand.
• When the posts are of a controversial nature (e.g. religious, political, etc.) clearly the majority of “diggers” are non-religious and left wing. If you don’t believe me, just look through any of the political stories at digg and you’ll see that if you’re a conservative, you just need to file to the bottom of the page and if you’re liberal, you will get promoted to the top of the page.

I suppose that you can never create a system that will make everyone happy, but this current version is an illogical atrocious mess that really needs to be re-thought. I’m not sure what the underlying issues were with the previous iteration of the system, but this is definitely a step backwards.