This post was authored by a guest author, my good friend and a great blogger Stan Schroeder.
When Digg formally unbanned twenty or so previously banned sites I kept a close eye on them, just to see how well they will do and will any of them be banned again.
As it turns out, those sites are – for all practical purposes – still banned. Digg Search for URL of any of these sites in the last 7 days will yield no results. But if you include buried stories, you’ll see that many stories from these sites were submitted, and subsequently buried before they could reach the front page.
Now, one could say that it’s to be expected: after all, these sites were banned for some reason, so some Digg users will be likely to bury them again. However, look closely to the results of these searches:
digitalpoint
paulstamatiou
johnchow
seopedia
rockmymonkey
connectedinternet
kineda
lucafiligheddu
Absolutely all stories submitted from these domains are buried (by buried I don’t mean that a couple of users buried them, I mean that they’re gone from all the lists on Digg, and thus have had absolutely no exposure). Furthermore, many are buried at less than a couple of votes. Only two stories, submitted 6 days ago and having only one vote, weren’t buried (that’s 2 in at least 30), which gave me an interesting opportunity. I buried these stories myself (this won’t hurt anyone, since these are old stories with no chance of ever getting more exposure). One vote was all it took to make them buried.
Now, any experienced digger will surely tell you that this is very odd. First of all, it takes quite a few buries for a story to get buried completely. It’s hard to estimate this number but I’m positive that a story in the upcoming section can withstand 5 buries and still get to the front page of Digg (and this is a conservative estimate).
Secondly, the users who Digg through the upcoming stories section are rarely being negative; they’re looking for the good stuff, not stories to bury. Most of the buries (if a story is not obvious spam/racially insulting/porn/political extremism) will come when the story reaches the hot lists in the upcoming sections, or actually gets to the front page.
Thirdly, many of these stories have absolutely no reason whatsoever to be buried. A story about Google Blogger being unavailable, or a story about fast growing occupations for college educated workers might receive a couple of buries – as can every story on Digg, but are they really so bad that several users buried them while there were still at 1 or 2 points? I highly doubt it.
Hypothetical part starts here
So, what’s happening here? My guess (which might not be correct, since I have no insight into Digg’s algorithms) would be that Digg admins introduced some kind of bury-weight system for websites. Domains who were previously banned, or perhaps got many buries in the past, will get buried very easily – perhaps just one or two buries is enough.
If this is true, it’s an awful decision from Digg. Now any digger who holds a grudge against one of those sites can keep their stories from ever reaching Digg’s front page – and he/she can do it alone (or perhaps with a help of one or two friends). The potential for abuse is so big that I’m sure that many a digger will pick on these vulnerable sites just to see how his vote sinks their stories to oblivion.
Now, I’m not going into whether these sites deserve to be buried. But enabling selective abuse with no consequences is no way to treat a community (and websites that get posted on Digg are also a part of this community or ecosystem, if you will).
Other possibilities
There are numerous other possibilities as to why this happens. Perhaps a story can get buried if Digg’s algorithms decide that a group is always voting on a story, as John Chow proposed? Initially I’ve dismissed this theory as ludicrous: it would go against the friends system on Digg, and it would mean that your friends should avoid digging your story, which makes no sense. I still don’t believe that John’s hypothesis is correct, but everything is possible as there’s clearly something odd happening here.
Finally, there’s the possibility that there’s a group of users actively burying stories from these previously banned websites. I find this very hard to believe, though. Some of these websites were off Digg for a long time. Most Diggers have already forgotten about some of them. Furthermore, what group of diggers is so active that they can monitor upcoming stories 24/7 and bury these stories with about 95% success?
Whatever the reason, I don’t like how the new system works. It’s obvious that some stories won’t get to the front page and it’s not going to based at all on their quality, but on a bunch of factors that only Digg admins can understand. I guess they have reasons for changing their algorithms in this way, but I also believe they should be looking at the bigger picture and focusing only on getting quality stories to the front page.
Originally posted on March 2, 2007 @ 12:51 pm
Everton says
Hi
thanks for pointing this out. I haven’t wanted to speak about this as to be honest I’d learnt to live without Digg’s traffic, and my server has been a lot healthier.
2 of the 3 links that appear on Digg for my domain were submitted by regular readers of mine who informed me that something fishy was going on as their submissions were buried within minutes.
The only way that this could be happening so fast is if someone who has a grudge against my site has setup an alert and is instantly burying any story – unlikely.
I think what is happening is that Digg itself is burying stories as there are far too many stories being buried far too fast for it to be user-driven. Here are some more examples of stories that were buried in minutes:
http://techtites.com/2007/02/24/how-reddit-beat-the-digg-mafia/
http://techtites.com/2007/02/17/why-the-digg-mafia-will-cost-kevin-rose-millions/
The second story still managed to get over 300 diggs despite being buried.
I’m speaking out now as I’ve given up on Digg and I think that people need to learn about another way in which Digg is abusing its position.
finally, I was never told why I was banned initially but some of the other sites were banned because once you hit a certain number of buries your domain was automatically banned. I think this is what happened to me as my articles were getting repeatedly dugg – for instance I had one article get on the homepage 3 times in about a week (this was before ‘improved’ its dupe protection).
Thanks for being brave enough to post about this, as it will probably put you on Digg’s ‘watchlist’ now.
EB
Everton says
ps you need to upgrade to subscribe to comments v2.1 now you’ve upgraded to WP2.1 as its kicking up a nasty error if anyone ticks the subscribe box – it’s a known problem
me says
I’m sure you know already but you’ve been buried already after only 2 votes…….Digg Bury Brigade or Digg?
Stan Schroeder says
It was to be expected, and it just reiterates the point of this article. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on without insight into Digg’s algorithms, but experienced Diggers know that stories could not get buried in such an express way before.
Ajay says
The websites above must be flagged internally and hence a single bury sends the posts in burydom!
Apparently, “unbanned” means stories can be submitted from the sites. It didn’t say anything about the stories not being banned again!
Stan Schroeder says
@Everton: those stories you pointed out aren’t a good example: they would probably get buried a lot because of the controversial titles. But some of the articles from the “unbanned” sites were completely neutral and yet got buried at 2-3 diggs, and that’s what’s weird here.
Also, I would like to point out once again that it’s very hard to be conclusive about this. You can never really know how many people buried a certain story. Also, it seems that buried stories can get unburied now, which wasn’t the case before. Articles from RockMyMonkey aren’t buried at this moment, and I’m quite sure they were buried when I did the article. This makes it hard to draw exact conclusions. I guess the bottom line is this: if all stories from a website get buried within minutes without a good reason, people will notice something is wrong.
Everton says
@Stan
I agree that some had controversial titles but the fact still remains that they got buried within minutes, which could only have happened if Digg had buried them which raises another question – is it right for Digg to bury bad stories about itself, but be more than happy to allow posts criticising other companines and organistations?
Paula Mooney says
Yes, Digg unbanned my blog’s url, but they’re obviously still doing crazy stuff to my logon id.
Like even when I try to Digg other stories I like, it tells me I need to logon even when I’m already logged on.
I don’t care.
Stan Schroeder says
@Paula: that sometimes happens, I sincerely doubt that they would go that far. I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but I would definitely like to know what’s going on and why are certain storied buried for no apparent reason.
1389 says
AFAIK, a single Digg admin has the power to bury (or promote) any story unilaterally, without anybody knowing. Of course, nobody will know either way. As long as Digg admins have this much power, Digg is NOT the grass-roots, “democratic,” community-run, site that it purports to be.
Since there is no audit of what Digg’s admins are doing, this is a perfect opportunity for blogola/Diggola as an “inside job” – with nobody being the wiser. A little money or other recompense to Digg insiders can do wonders for anybody wanting to promote stories that favor their client and bury stories that don’t. Hmmmm…
1389 says
Now here’s something interesting!
My user ID, namely 1389, was banned from Digg within MINUTES after I posted the comment you see above, namely http://www.901am.com/2007/has-digg-really-unbanned-those-banned-sites.html#comment-3992 – along with these two other comments:
http://digg.com/tech_news/1_Miiiiiillion_Users#c5594565
Does this mean that Digg will show its respect and gratitude for these million Digg users by:
1) Providing a “Who buried this?” tab;
2) Taking away the ability of Digg admins to bury or promote stories on their own, without regard to what the Digg voting public wants;
3) Decreasing the weight given to a bury as opposed to a digg, so that stories with a large enough proportion of diggs to buries will stay in the upcoming stories queue;
or perhaps even…
4) Taking away the bury button entirely, and replacing it with a button to report spam to the admins, so that they can review it later, and decide whether or not the site is so egregiously spammy that it should be banned.
No? You mean that you folks at Digg don’t really care enough about us to consider doing any of these things?
Didn’t think so.
http://digg.com/software/Digg_Search_Much_Improved_Can_We_Have_More#c5594665
Okay, Kevin, now that we (maybe) have a tiny bit of your attention, how about doing something about the major problem on Digg that so many people have been complaining about recently, namely burying? How about:
1) Providing a “Who buried this?” tab;
2) Taking away the ability of Digg admins to bury or promote stories on their own, without regard to what the Digg voting public wants;
3) Decreasing the weight given to a bury as opposed to a digg, so that stories with a large enough proportion of diggs to buries will stay in the upcoming stories queue;
or perhaps even…
4) Taking away the bury button entirely, and replacing it with a button to report spam to the admins, so that they can review it later, and decide whether or not the site is so egregiously spammy that it should be banned.
If you don’t do something effective about this problem, people will draw the conclusion that you don’t really care about the many new Digg users who have just now put your site over the million-user milsestone. So how about it?
I have done NOTHING that violates the Digg terms of service. The only explanation that I have for this is the unwillingness of Digg’s admins to allow anybody to question their power to bury and promote stories at will.
This PROVES exactly what I have been saying!
HMTKSteve says
I posted a short list of “auto-bury” sites on my blog Digg’s new ‘auto bury’ feature and the majority of blogs I listed have one thing in common, they have hosted articles critical of digg.
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.
Danny Sullivan says
You can add my site the unofficial bury list. I’m doing a longer story about this, but I’ve posted a lot of what’s happening here:
http://daggle.com/070308-210650.html
1389 says
I still have yet to hear any reason why Digg account 1389 was banned. But that’s to be expected. What are they supposed to tell me – that 1389 was banned for whistleblowing? I can figure that out for myself; the timing made it just too obvious.
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 [email protected], 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]
frEE says
In my honest opinion, sites like the JohnChow blog and the digitalpoint forums are great ressources and shouldn’t have been banned at all.
play uk bingo says
Thanks for posting this, I’m new to all this stuff
but I’m enjoying reading up on it all
and finding out everyones points of view
free says
Why on earth would they bury digitalpoint? It’s an awesome forum.
Sergios says
Cool…