Diggers have voted: If you swear you’re not cool, you’re a tool!

In a moment of weirdness I did some research on Digg and came up with a strange fact…

Although it’s seen as cool nowadays to drop the F-word into almost everything, there’s one place where this is proven to work against you: Digg stories.

Digg Community says no to the F-word!

I went back through the entire history of Digg submissions and noticed an interesting pattern: no Digg story with the F-word in the title has ever been promoted. Ever.

And further, only a handful of Digg stories with the F-word in the description have been promoted. Here they are:

Incidentally, the two “promoted” Digg stories that came closes to having the F-word in their title are these two:

Now, the question might be asked: Does Digg explicitly “bury” these stories or stop them getting promoted? The short answer is that none of them have received enough votes for that to even be a problem! So it’s the community passing judgement all by itself!

I think the real point here is that the Digg Community has spoken: If you insist on profanity we won’t vote for you. Simple.

Another thing I noticed: A-list diggers don’t swear, as a rule. All the F-words are getting dropped by newbies or people who appear to be intentionally wasting a submission. And so I humbly suggest Mike (aka “prickwear”) has some really fast learning to do, unless he wants to continue completely wasting his time (and everyone else’s).

Almost every one of Mike’s submissions are a) linking to his own site and b) contain profanity in either/both the title and the description. That sort of makes him the new benchmark for “What not to do on Digg”, don’t you think?!

In summary… the Digg Community had clearly cast its vote on childish F-word dropping submitters: you’re not cool, you’re a tool!