Digg’s democracy was put on a benchmark today when Ajay’s article “Why The Digg Mafia Will Cost Kevin Rose Millions!†was submitted at Digg. It received nearly 100 diggs within couple of hours and the story got marked as ‘promoted’, but it never hit the frontpage. As soon as it came to Digg’s attention, it was marked as inaccurate by them. Angry diggers started firing agitating through comments:
“The Digg staff will bury it, as they do with all articles with an anti-Digg slant. Nothing must disturb the Digg paradise world.â€
“Made popular a few minutes ago. and now with the Digg message that the content may be inaccurate. In other words, the Mafia are working hard. Goodbye Digg. Good bye democracy. Perhaps time for something more …. delicious?â€
“Final call to digg, Why don’t u let this story goto frontpage and take the openion of the fellow diggers, Is there any democrary in here or its just bunch of digital mobs ?â€
“It says that the story has been made popular but it’s not appearing on the homepage….don’t be fooled. Someone is playing games here at Digg, or Digg’s system automatically adds ‘made popular’ once a certain threshold is reached…kinda makes a mockery of the fact that someone somewhere tried to bury this post…..â€
I don’t get it, how can an opinion be inaccurate. Just because the article slightly opposes Digg, they can’t mark it as inaccurate. Come digg, this is just an opinion, not a cease and desist letter! This is an open world, where people can choose what’s right and what’s wrong. Why not leave it for the diggers to decide?
Don’t talk against Digg, Digg is god!
Digg tries to suppress all articles that fail agree with their ideology. Say something negative against Digg and pooof! You’re banned from Digg. If I started listing out the number of good sites banned by digg, this post would go endlessly long, so I’ll make it short: PaulStamatiou, CyberNet, Connected Internet, John Chow, TechBuzz and lots more…
Buries weigh more than Diggs
Strangely, Digg algorithm weighs more for buries than Diggs. So it doesn’t take any more than 10 buries to get you out of Digg (forever).
901am writes that Digg infringes upon its own principals of sending traffic back to the original source by embedding video content from video hosts like YouTube, Google Videos and Metacafe. Digg is killing their profitability by leeching their bandwidth and not sending traffic to their site. How fair is it?
When someone over IM or IRC asks me to Digg his/her post, I really feel bad to see the level of quality prevailing over Digg. Only a bunch of diggers have absolute control over the homepage (nearly 66% of the homepage is ruled by these members). How long will this go on? Alexa traffic stats clearly show traffic dipped faced by digg over the last 3 months.
Conclusion: I’m not against Digg or its mafia members, but I’m against their censorship policies. Good or Bad, Digg has to allow the community to choose. All we need is freedom!
Written by 
wrote, on February 18th, 2007
The digg community thinks that they are “so” special to the online world.The problem is that we gave more inmportance to them because they implemented this idea “greatly” at first.Like Microsoft for the PC, Intel for processors and Google for search.
They are popular not because o their product is great but it gave people that experience for the first time and people got addicted with it.But in the case of digg they are just pure amateur fan boys.
wrote, on February 18th, 2007
I agree completely. Digg’s as good as gone. I’m really bored of the stories. Everything’s about game consoles, or some stupid dumb joke. ***, it’s full of material one would expect in poor forwards.
hmm…I think I’ll write something about it.
wrote, on February 18th, 2007
digg ban your website?
wrote, on February 18th, 2007
well, i can only say that digg is at fall and I’m sure that the alexa traffic gives us some indication. Not only that, digg is actually getting very bad responce these days. The only reason for that is some members and may be to some extent digg’s policies.
wrote, on February 18th, 2007
I dunno if you’ve thought of this before, but I thought of workarounds with banned domains
http://www.anirudhsanjeev.org/.....is-banned/
wrote, on February 18th, 2007
I am totally annoyed to see how the story missed the frontpage.
If they want to save Digg. They must open Digg algorithm to study and criticism, Make it possible to see who’s burying what and introduce Resubmission process for Banned Websites.
They can’t censor the whole internet. Ajay’s story will hit frontpage of other social bookmarking websites.
wrote, on February 18th, 2007
I read another very interesting aticle about the similar topic.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/2/14/131127/709
wrote, on February 19th, 2007
Digg has turned a bit for the worse. To be quite honest I am surprised that Google hasn’t bought them out yet. Google seems to be just as invasive and they are buying everything in arms reach.
wrote, on February 20th, 2007
Quick Links 19-02-07: Digg Mafia Edition…
I’m dedicating this set of links to the great posts that referenced Ajay’s article on ‘Why The Digg Mafia will cost Kevin Rose Millions‘.
This one is my favourite. I wanted to leave a comment but you have to register to comment…
wrote, on March 29th, 2007
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!!!