As if all that were not enough, several people on my friends list have recently been banned, also without an explanation. But then, they’d been making much the same complaints about the bury brigade as I had been making.

The only reason I was still active on Digg is because it still reaches such a huge audience. However – usage has already begun to fall off, and as soon as a competitor starts gaining on them sufficiently, I’ll know where to go.

Since I no longer have anything to lose, or anything to protect, let me tell it like it is.

[flame on]

Digg is a cesspool. Its admins are worthy of the Soviet bureaucracy under Andropov or Chernenko, and its programmers are stumped at anything more demanding than “Hello, World.”

Kevin Rose is a kid who happened to be in the right place at the right time. But he is out of his depth, and his impenetrable solipsism and his crowd of worshippers keeps him from knowing just how far out of his depth he actually is. He is too immature and irresponsible to face facts and confront problems rather than covering them up. That’s a recipe for squandering all of his initial advantage, and I can see it happening now.

Is Kevin in on the corruption at Digg? I don’t know. But then, I am not aware of any way that Kevin would been able to turn a legitimate profit from Digg thus far – and if that is correct, the temptation would certainly exist.

The real issue is that there is no transparency about what Digg admins, programmers, and owners are doing with their power to promote some stories and bury others – because they can pass off the outcome as “the democratic decision of the Digg user base.”

What controls are there to stop Digg insiders from using this power to promote various scams, such as blogola/”Diggola,” political campaign dirty tricks, securities trading pump-and-dump, and who knows what all else? I’ve been around computers and in the business world long enough to know that whenever proper controls are lacking, miscreants will find and make use of the vulnerabilities.

One million Digg users? Yeah, right! I wonder how many are dupes, or sock puppets – how many represent accounts that Digg has disabled for real or alleged “abuse” – and how many represent legitimate users who tried Digg for a little while, got disgusted, and resolved never to come back.

With perhaps a million registered users, and maybe ten times that many lurkers who read Digg stories without signing up, that’s the population of a major metropolitan area. In a population that size, there is no way to exclude sex perverts, cyberstalkers, identity thieves, and criminals and crazies of every possible stripe, including actual jihadists and their sympathizers. But it’s little use to report even the most flagrant of them to abuse@digg.com, because the victim is as likely to be banned as the perpetrator! After all, some of these abusers come in handy for chasing away ordinary Digg users who happen to espouse points of view that Digg prefers to suppress.

Finally, if you are a Digg user, and you get tired of all this and decide you aren’t interested in using that account any more – you’ll find there is no way to get Digg to cancel or delete the account. It stays out there forever, thus artificially inflating their account totals. That makes Digg look much more influential than it really is, for the benefit of potential advertisers, investors, and so forth.

[flame off]

Can anyone explainwhy this article was buried on Digg? It had about 700 Diggs when it was buried and was still gaining 3-4 diggs every minute.