After doing some extensive testing and empirical data gathering over the past two weeks I am 99% convinced there is a digg auto-bury feature. Certain domains are flagged to be automatically buried and removed from the normal voting system with as little as one vote and within few as few hours of getting in the queue. These aren’t just SEO content domains, they aren’t anti digg domains or content. There’s simply no way enough people could have seen the digg submission to actually legitimately bury the story.
The Digg administration will continue to hide behind the guise of user moderated democracy, however with lack of voting transparency (yes buries are votes and need to be transparent) what we really have is an oligarchy ochlocracy of web 2.0 knoblemen.
Update: Hat tip to Matt for his most excellent vocabulary skills!!!
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Michael, I couldn’t agree with you more. We had a lot of success on digg for a while with a handful of stories hitting the front page. Now, stories submitted from our site are buried very quickly and yet continue to get diggs even after they’ve been buried. Also, sites like JohnChow.com have seen similar results. Digg may have unbanned a bunch of sites, but they definitely are not letting those sites (along with others) to hit their front page any time soon.
Also, this article has some pretty convincing evidence as well.
http://social-media-news.com/digg/why-digg-needs-the-bury-brigade.html
Basing your business around the whim of Digg is a waste of time and energy. I’m not saying you wolf, but too often I hear too many people thinking their fortunes are made or lost based upon getting dugg. To me, that is the complete wrong way to think of a long-term success strategy online.
But I guess most people just want quick, fast traffic they can hope to turn into quick fast bucks. Sigh.
Another cool word in addition to oligarchy is ochlocracy. I don’t get to use that word very often, which is a shame. It’s a cool word.
Maybe it is connected with the paid review thing.
JohnChow.com? LOL! Nuff said’
Good word!
Very interesting study. I agree that basing your business on Digg isn’t something to count on, but if Michaels findings are correct, Digg has some explaining to do.
Digg was born out of what some folks like to call the ‘wisdom of crowds’. Really, Digg was simply ‘the wisdom of a few in the crowd’. When the crowd controls the content, you simply get the worst content ever. You’ll never get something unique, because a crowd is never unique. I gave up on Digg a while ago when I learned about services like UserSubmitter who paid people do digg stories.
Well said.
Personally I don’t have a huge problem with Digg censoring their content, What does annoy me is the way they deny it.
Nobody likes a hypocrite.
The auto-bury feature was created because of my submissions. I thought everybody would love to see my posts about breakdancing! Apparently not the DIGG ocligarchy.
Digg should take into consideration different levels of digg users (friend count, activity, member age, etc) and measure buries of a particular story per segment. Using the average to determine if a story gets voted up or down. This could curtail the power of the digg elite minority.
I think there may be an auto bury feature for comments on digg also. I made a lot of responses one day to old articles & everyone of them was dugg down, Almost instantaneously
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