Digg’s new ‘auto bury’ feature
It has recently come to my attention that the recent news of sites being unbanned from Digg may have been a red herring thrown at us to divert our attention from the full impact of a new Digg feature. I am talking about Digg's new "auto bury" feature.
New Auto-Bury Feature
Yes indeed, it's a new feature!
- Sites affected
- HMTK.com
- Pronetadvertising
- Baron.vc
- Frantic Industries
- Profy
- The Plugg
- John Chow
That is just my short list.
So, what do these blogs have in common?
With the exception of the last three, all of these blogs have been covering the recent Digg fiasco about the uncovering of the Bury Brigade. Some of those same sites have also covered Digg in the past in a "constructive criticism" manner.
As to the other three, I'm not sure why they are being targeted though the last two were once banned from Digg.
Why should I care?
You should care because Digg trumpets itself as a place where people can post items of interest to them and share. Digg also claims to be a Democracy yet only half of it's voting system is open to public inspection (you can see diggs but not buries). We do not know if this 'auto-bury' feature truly is the voting public making a choice or something else.
I do not want to see Digg to continue to spiral into an abyss where stories are controlled by the tyranny of a small minority! Enough folks have already covered how bad it is in the political areas of Digg with campaign operatives consistently burying stories that paint their candidate in an unflattering light or show their opponent in a good light.
What can I do?
The best thing you can do is email Digg Support or their Feedback people and ask them about this. If they get enough email from members they may take the problem seriously and give us some options.
What sort of options?
- Allow members to have a list of sites that they want to never see stories from.
- Allow members to always see buried stories.
- Have Digg enforce a policy where if a user consistently buries a particular site their buries will no longer count against that site.
Please comment below.
PS: Don't bother submitting this to Digg, I'm on the list...
- The truth about Digg’s bury brigade
- MyBlogLog adds “auto-join” to communities
- Digg’s “bury” system
- Digg: The Wisdom of Crowds
- A Solution To Digg’s Blog Spam Problem?
How about a petition. It would voice out more than just plain individual emails to them. What makes you think that they would seriously read what each one of us send to them? Gather the voices here, and have a go at submitting an online petition.
A petition won’t work. Digg has proven many times that they don’t give a damn about its community.
Only thing that would probably work is if other blogs picked up this story and started submitting it to digg. I know they tend to bury all bad publicity, but eventually something will get through.
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Got banned from that site a long time ago with no response. Not sure why as all I did was digg a few original articles and one reprint summary to “Save the Internet”.
From what I hear digg is just empty traffic that will take the server down with load anyway. Best of luck with the new developments.
Digg is empty traffic in that it does not convert. It also tends to act like a swarm of locusts in that it comes in, eats up your server and then departs.
A small percentage of Digg traffic is good and does convert to new readers. Take a quick look at my RSS feed numbers, they went up by 200+ over the last few days.
[...] worse is that there’s even less transparency. So much that some are longing for the days when they were [...]
I have just now been BANNED from Digg. This happened within MINUTES after I posted messages suggesting how easily Digg’s bury feature allows it to be corrupted via its own admin staff. This is exactly the same thing that you were complaining about in your recent blog entry that was posted to Digg (and of course buried).
Now, it seems that if you dare to question the way things are done at Digg, you are not only buried, but BANNED.
Steve, here’s a suggestion. Make a big list of sites who have had all of their submissions buried in the last 7 days before reaching the front page. Include the list from my 901am article. Here’s another one from the top of my head:
deepjiveinterests.com
My first comment didn’t get through, it seems. Anyway, all these lists of silently banned sites should be put together into one big list and published - preferably on a site with high traffic and visibility.
Any chance of them letting you back in or is that something you’d really just rather not care to bother with?
I also agree about the point that we can only see the “diggs” and not the “bury” votes. That’s suspicious and seems designed to allow them to work behind the scenes to influence.
It’s not the point of getting on Digg that is important. What is important is that “buried” is the new “banned” for these sites.
When a site is “banned” you can say, “Digg hates me.”
When a site is “buried” Digg will say, “no, the community hates you.”
I still do not see how a story with about 700 Diggs can be buried.
@Wild: it’s important to point out that actual buries by users don’t have anything to do with stories from these domains being buried. Or, if they do, it’s negligible.
This would be the perfect opportunity to launch a new Digg. If I only had the money and resources, I would be all of this.
I read this on Plime.com. Plime is completely transparent. Digg users have long known that 1 digg from a top digger is worth more than 1 digg from a regular user. Plime works that way too, except you are shown a person’s power by their name and on top of that, you are shown the total power of people who voted on a story (not just the total number of people who voted).
Plime also does not ban users. The creator of the site isn’t even the highest ranked user there. Only the community can ban users. It’s a great site because of transparency.
I started seeing the hits from Plime in my server logs this morning. I will be investigating the site and reporting on it soon.
Hi Steve! Thank you for including Profy to your list - it’s great that someone cares enough about it all. But I have two corrections for you: Profy was once banned from Digg for apparently no reason a couple of months ago (unbanning took a week, I think and they told it had been by mistake). And we have had a story about that was indirectly related to bury brigade (http://www.profy.com/2007/02/28/supernova17-banned-from-digg/). So there’s plenty of reasons for us to be buried as well. And I really don’t understand what we can do about it - I only hope Digg owners will understand that they will eventually lose users together with good news and everything they’ll have will be photos of awesome lightnings :) Though it is actually very disappointing when you see a really good story from your blog having over 100 diggs and never getting to the front page.
Yea, I hate it. Digg has the same type of articles over and over because a small minority controls what gets dugg. It’s ridiculous because there’s many of us who are interested in other things other than linux, how to crack this and that, and what’s new for the wii…