I was surprised today to see a post on John Chow's website stating that he has been unbanned from Digg. It's not just him either!
According to a post on pronetadvertising: Digg Lets Banned Domains Back In, a large number of previously blocked domains have been added back to Digg. This is very interesting as, in the past, Digg has always been steadfast in that once a domain is blocked it stays blocked.
This makes me wonder if this sudden change of heart may have been caused by a loss of data! Digg has been awfully slow lately. In fact another blogger did some math and asked the question "how efficient is Digg?" A question whose answer appears to be, "not very" efficient.
There is nothing on the Digg blog about this yet. If this was a database error expect those sites to be put back on the banned list shortly!
I doubt it’s a database error and attribute it more to John’s quality site that has Digg see that his site does make money, but not in such a blatant way as to take advantage of the digg system. John contributes just as much as he takes out, so I really hope it was Digg’s conscious that got to them and not some server error.
[...] 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 [...]
Why was John Chow removed in the first place? Did he violate their terms of service, i.e. spamming?
Some of his posts were spammy. When a user submits a posts that says, “look how much money my blog made” you can expect it to be buried a spam. That is not the fault of John Chow though, it is the fault of his readers for submitting things that should not be submitted.
He was also very successful as getting his content on the home page and this annoyed the bury brigade.
It would be nice if Digg had a system setup where a blogger could embed a tag such as “no digg” in their article so that when Digg goes through the submission process it would see that tag and not allow the content to be submitted to Digg.
Thanks for the explanation Steve. His readers did him in.
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.
Sounds like the bury brigade is about to become a built-in “feature” over on Digg.