Digg, the social news sharing website used to be my first stop every morning when I wanted to check out what was happening in the world. Now, like many of the other casual users of the site, I’ve stopped bothering with it. I’ve had enough of the artificial ranking of non-newsworthy articles, and the fact that so many people seem to be on the site just to abuse it.

The problem for Digg started when SEO companies discovered that you could get loads of in bound links to a website from bloggers after your story appeared on Digg. As soon as this happened, the idea of Linkbait was born – Linkbait is the practice of adding some controversial or useful content on your site to attract people to share it with others and generate a lot of links.

All of this would not have been such a big problem for Digg users if the content that people were posting to it was high quality and useful or news worthy, but unfortunately, it isn’t. Because Digg is so easy to abuse, you now get stories that have no business appearing on the site ranking on the front page.

I have seen an article boasting 10 great sunglasses tips on the front page of Digg!

The users of Digg aren’t the only people losing out from this wholesale abuse of the system. Social Media Marketing is a hot ticket right now, and companies like SEOMoz are charging thousands of dollars for a Linkbait campaign. The case studies that these companies show their clients talk about how by getting onto the front page of Digg they will get loads of new links fast.

Now, six months ago, if I saw a great piece on Digg, I probably would link to it to share it with other people, but the fact is, just because a piece about why I need an unsecured loan is on the front page of Digg doesn’t mean that its going to get links.

There used to be a really good system in place at Digg to prevent abuse, but that seems to have collapsed under the sheer weight of abuse that’s happening. Digg abuse is bad for readers, but worse for the companies who are paying out thousands for a service that generally won’t work.