New and Improved Digg: Now with more buries!
Thursday 8 March 2007 - Filed under Uncategorized
Seems like only yesterday that the world rejoiced when Digg unbanned domains that were effectively shut out of the submission queue. Now it seems like we have an even trickier situation where unbanned is the new banned. I haven’t seen any of the so-called unbanned domains ever make any head way on Digg. Only now we have no idea of knowing what a domain’s standing with Digg is, just that stories from a given domain silently drop off never to be seen again.
What’s worse is that there’s even less transparency. So much that some are longing for the days when they were banned.
From my firsthand experience, I’m getting the feeling that Digg is not only weighting domains but also the users that submit them, making it progressively harder for negatively scored domains to make it to the front page and thus pushing it deeper into the banned domain territory but also penalizing the submitter in some way.
I have a hunch that they’re starting to weight submitters themselves regardless of their standing (number of popular stories & friends) in an effort to eradicate “gaming and manipulation by a select few”. This is just a hunch but I think the ratio of popular stories per submission has gone down significantly for top users across the board. I’d love to see any evidence proving me right or wrong. However, if you look at the distribution of submitters on the front page, it’s very rare to have two submissions from the same user on the same page. It’s almost as if they’re rationing out one per day.
Some stories with good velocity and good URLs are not making it either so they may be weighing user accounts as another part of their “stealth” features. Even with all the tweaks to Digg’s algorithms one thing is clear: once you get on their bad side, you’ll rarely get a second chance.
I’ve been submitting some stories from “authority sites” to see if that would affect my account standing. Another peculiar aspect of Digg is that certain sites such as TechCrunch, engadget, gizmodo or even Wired are virtually untouchable despite the fact that lots of people submit most of their stories whether they are good or bad. Sure, these are big blogs with large readerships but for smaller blogs, getting every story submitted spells the kiss of death.
I wonder what’s going on?
References:
Digg Lets Banned Domains Back In
Ramblings from the Marginalized » Digg’s new ‘auto bury’ feature
Has Digg really “unbanned” those banned sites?
Digg the Blog » Blog Archive » On Buries and Blocking
So Much For Being Back On Digg « John Chow dot Com
2007-03-08 » baron
8 March 2007 @ 7:27 pm
Yes, I think URLs and submitters are being marked as tainted in the eyes of Digg.
8 March 2007 @ 9:50 pm
Except for Steve’s story, I think this is the fastest I’ve ever seen a story get buried on Digg.
I would probably have more luck submitting porn
9 March 2007 @ 12:10 am
LOL I could probably have an exclusive interview with Kevin Rose along with pictures shaking hands and still get buried. I guess this blog is that big of a threat.
Yeah right.
9 March 2007 @ 2:14 am
Welcome to the new banned list on Digg. Grab a chair while you still can because more and more of us are being added to the new banned room. Unless you are Techcrunch/Engadget/Wired or a similar “A” list blog…
9 March 2007 @ 10:25 am
We need a badge that says “banned by Digg” for status.
29 March 2007 @ 7:21 am
Digg.com is getting cocky and banning small web sites just because digg’s users submit them to digg and digg’s moderators don’t like it. Scifidigg.com is the latest victim of Digg’s “We are big, you are small and we can do whatever we want” attitude.
First some background.
After running the website Scifi2u.com for the last year we realised there was a demand for a scifi digg type website – 6 Days ago ScifiDigg.com was born and is powered by open source Pligg and the YouTube API.
So what went wrong?
The site went live on the 22 March 2007. People submitted stories and video links to digg and other sites del.icio.us, Yahoo, Simply and Reddit. Having a submit button makes submitting very easy and fast but that could be a problem.
Let’s get to the point
WITHIN 6 DAYS THE SITE HAS BEEN BANNED FROM DIGG
Digg’s moderators decided that since the link pointed to my site and the posts are mainly videos from YouTube ScifiDigg should be banned from digg and no other links from scifidigg.com can be posted to digg.
Digg’s response
I contacted digg to find out what happened and why they blocked my site. The response I got from them was that my site violated their terms of use, by copying another site. I explained to them that although the video is streamed by YouTube we give the facility for original coments to be added.
The response I got was that they do not allow sites that copy other sites to be submitted to digg. I told them that according to their rules they should also ban Yahoo news, since it does not have an original content but republish articles from PCWorld, Reuters, MACWorld and others. Also falls under this category other major sites like neowin.net, blink.nu and many more that are doing exactly the same infact they should ban YouTube because the video content is often copied from other video websites. But hey, they are big sites and digg can’t pick on them without repercussion, like they can pick on small blogs that try to establish themselves.
So what have we learned?
·Digg’s users don’t really determine what gets promoted, but digg’s moderators do.
·Digg have a different set of rules for small site and different rules for big sites, even though both are doing the same.
·Digg will ban a small site just because one of its user’s submitted an article that other digg members liked and promoted, but moderator didn’t like the link.
·Digg will not listen to reason when told that the site did not violate its TOS.
I am going to create a Digg.com clone http://www.BannedDigg.com Watch this space!!!