Did Digg Really Unban Blogs or is it a Database Malfunction?
Saturday 24 February 2007 - Filed under social media
The blogs are currently buzzing with the news that Digg has reinstated a list of domains previously banned or have they? There is still no official word on Digg’s company blog and I’m with Steve in thinking it’s some kind of a glitch. Not only are all Digg pages very slow to load, various queries take forever or return incomplete results.
Database Wonkiness
John Chow has returned in spectacular form only to get all promising stories buried and put on the fast track to another ban.
On top of that the query for all stories shows a duplicate:
General Amnesty or General Amnesia?
In fact, if you look at the list you’ll see that almost any and every blog that was banned seems to have been unbanned. Anything goes from high-quality tech blogs to celebrity gossip. Is this for real?
Everyone’s still waiting for official word but there is a high probability at this point that they tried to roll out changes and in the process corrupted some of the data, in particular the banned list.
The site loads very slow even when fully logged out. Now if you have lots of friends on Digg you know that the site practically crawls on you. However, if you logout things are actually quite snappy. Well, since the ban was lifted Digg is very slow either way and query results come back incomplete once out of every couple of times.
Same Crap Different Day
At the end of the day, whether the reinstatement is real or not nothing has really changed as long as the bury brigade is in place. They have responded to the news as they always have, by silently moving in to block these domains from enjoying their moment in the sun. In the case of John Chow he just got 4 stories buried in one day.
Will this actually mean anything? Not as long as Digg and the community:
- Refuses to have an open dialog to establish a sane submission policy (what’s spam and what’s not)
- Let the bury brigade run free and build increased hostility toward “non-authority” website owners
I guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I’ve got my fingers crossed.
Update:
I guess it’s real. Explains the general sluggishness of the site too.
Digg Upgrades Spam Armor, Unblocks Sites
References:
Digg Lets Banned Domains Back In
Ramblings from the Marginalized ยป Data problems at Digg?
2007-02-24 » baron
24 February 2007 @ 6:22 pm
I think it’s a smart move on their behalf. The banned domain list on digg has become so big that a lot of important sites were not covered by digg. Moreso a lot of bloggers would not submit their own sites (or friends’ sites) in fear that they will get banned as well. The result is that a) Many site owners turned to the competition (netscape, plime, stumbleupon) b)Digg was becoming an irrelevant news source. The question to ask is whether the banning rules remain the same. If so, digg’s huge “bury brigade” of 12 year olds who are not interested in anything that is not Apple or Wii related will soon get all these sites re-banned.
24 February 2007 @ 7:04 pm
I still believe this was caused by a database error. Until I read otherwise on the Digg Blog I will continue to think that.
24 February 2007 @ 7:40 pm
I’m tempted to quip, “but will it blend?”
Whatever they did is slowing the site down like crazy that’s for sure.
At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter what changes they institute as long as they let the bury brigade roam free because they’ll just reinforce whatever rules they like (witnessing how quickly they killed John Chow).
The good thing (if this is true) we can just go ahead and submit our stuff and others stuff without first thinking, “is this going to lead to a ban?” Competition should always be what determines what story hits the front page and not submitters cowering about the repercussions.
We’ll see.
26 February 2007 @ 2:09 am
According to this:
http://www.johnchow.com/so-much-for-being-back-on-digg/
they might actually be in the process of collecting data. If I submit your site, I may be labelled part of your “Group”. Scary stuff.
26 February 2007 @ 2:49 am
Well, I submitted Paul Stamitiou’s site (also got buried), my own (for a change), yours and I think I voted on John Chow’s stuff so I guess that puts me in the high risk group. lol
Some time after that I got one on the front page.
As much as I like JC his Digg speculation is usually off mark. I wonder how they plan to sort this mess out though. It was bad enough with the bury brigade. If this is true people will get more cautious about Digging, votes become fewer, stories don’t gain momentum.
I don’t know about you but it takes forever for stories to gain critical momentum these days. What kind of news sits in the incoming for a day? They need to hire some real computer scientists that can make a real voting algorithm.
26 February 2007 @ 2:34 pm
Digg Unbanned Sites…
Digg maybe studying the digg behaviour of their user groups in some kind and putting a final test to the new algorithm. My guess is that they might have further degraded the value of the friend’s vote on a user’s friend list, which remind me of their…