Some of our readers may remember my post about the 10 features that Digg doesn’t have. But those were based mostly on my experiences with Digg from a user’s standpoint. Now that this site grows in traffic, I begin to see other weird flaws in the way my stories end up on Digg and the way Digg handles spam.
First of all, the unofficial rule of Digg is: don’t submit your own stuff. I understand where this comes from, but I’m still against it. In my opinion, if a Digg user enters his real website in his Digg profile and submits his own stories, it shows a certain degree of honesty. Spammers rarely do that - they would rather hide their identity. I know that this stems from thousands of spammers out there who keep submitting every story from their website, but I also think that the good stuff is easily recognizable from spam and that the quality of content should be the only merit for digging or burying a site.
As you may know, when a certain number of Digg users buries a story as spam, the site will get banned. And as Digg staff pointed out many times in email correspondence with various webmasters, “It will not be unbanned”. Now, this is pretty scary stuff; I don’t know what is the number of ‘bad’ votes you have to receive before your site gets banned, but I don’t want to experiment and find out. Now, I’m pretty sure noone would see this site as spammy, as it contains only my original content (and lots of it). However, the same thing can be said about this great site, but it is at this moment banned from Digg for reasons unknown to me. Now, as much as I do like to prove a point, I do not want my sites to end up banned, so I’ve decided not to submit stories from this website to Digg (last time I did that was 3 weeks ago).
But, I’ve found out that this creates another problem for me. You see, not all stories are Digg material. Sometimes I’ll just find a great piece of news on another website, add a thought or two and link to the original site. Or sometimes a story is good only when it’s news: a few days later it’s pointless to submit it to any social content site.
The problem is: some readers don’t recognize this, or don’t care about it. I’m not holding it against them: people just go to Digg and digg or submit or bury the stories they like. They don’t feel a big amount of responsibility and they probably shouldn’t - after all, Digg is just good fun for many users. But it creates a problem for me. I’ve seen some of my stories buried (and rightfully so) simply because they were submitted to Digg out of context or too late.
This story about the Venice Project is a good example. There’s nothing wrong with it, and I’m thankful to the user who submitted it for taking notice of my website, but: the story is old. When I wrote it it was pretty fresh, but it was submitted to Digg 8 days too late. Also, I don’t really bring much new to the table in the article: I didn’t get to try the beta of the Venice project, so it’s pointless for me to rant about it; that’s why I simply linked to the source of the news. It’s a legitimate news article which should give some information and some pointers to people who read this website, but not to people on Digg because on Digg there are probably already 10 stories on the same subject.
Now, Digg users (and remember, people who go to upcoming stories and promote new stories are mostly seasoned diggers who know when a story is old) might rightfully bury that article. I really hope they won’t bury it as spam, because even if it’s old, it’s not spam, but there’s a possibility that some user will get annoyed with an old story and bury it as spam just for the heck of it. Now, I wonder, is it possible that in the end I pay the penalty for too many stories like this?
This is just one of the reasons why Digg’s banning system is not good. In this case, you have a legitimate website, a legitimate user submitting a story from the site to Digg, and people completely rightfully burying it. So, seemingly nothing is wrong; however, in the end, there’s a slight possibility that the website gets a ban for no real reason.
Even if you forget about the possible ban (which I admit is not a very likely possibility), you still have the fact that if you leave submitting to others, your worst stories might end up on Digg and your best stories might end up undiscovered.
So, my message to Digg users would be this: don’t look down on people who submit their own stories. Bury the stories only if the stories themselves are bad/plagiarized/duplicates, or the site is an ad/popup hell. Don’t use the “Bury as spam ” option unless you’re absolutely certain the site you’re burying is completely worthless.
To Digg administrators I would recommend to add additional (automatic or editorial) checks to see if a site should really be banned, even if users are reporting it as spam. Another option is to remove the ban after a certain period of time and make them permanent only on several repeated offenses.
This said, I hope you had a good New Year celebration and didn’t do anything silly while drunk. The posts at franticindustries will resume in standard fashion as of today.
Hi, Excellent little article. It fits perfectly with my idea that you need to have some experts behind all of these so-called “social” websites (web2.0) in order to keep everything together. And this seems to not only be true in blog-sites, but other social-sites…
My prediction for 2007. Digg will be pretty much over within the year as even their huge number of users becomes bored with the concept. It’s membership and active user list is such a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the world’s web population anyway as to make it pretty much irrelevant. I don’t know anyone in the real world other than myself and my wife who have actually heard of Digg or Fark or Furl etc, but everyone I know (even my mother) knows about Google frinstance.
@David: Digg is currently getting recognition as ‘the’ place to get traffic to your website. This alone will make it huge, regardless of the actual users of the service.
This idea might not appeal to you. As a matter of fact, I have a certain disdain for it myself, for the same reasons you will I’m sure.
However, a good option would be to modify your template to conditionally display your “digg this” button. It could be forced on or off with a boolean value, as well as have some default behavior. For example, you could have it default on when an article surpasses an arbitrarily set number of characters. You could also have it automatically be removed after a certain number of days. You could combine these, and related features into a super-digg-centric site.
The part that sucks is you’d be tailoring your web site to digg when it should “just work.”
But, I guess, people tailor their sites to search engines all the time. If digg’s extremely important, perhaps it’s worth it (but I wouldn’t do it).
Naturally it doesn’t “protect” an article from being manually dugg (or dugg with a browser extension), but I’d be willing to bet that you wouldn’t get as many submissions without those digg buttons.
Nothing should be irreversible, if you design to take advantage of collaboration and competition.
If some type mutation had been designed to be irreversible, we should never have evolved from the stage of the amoeba.
Nice article. I think there will always be confusion with regard to submitting your own content. I’m still on the fence about it.
@Onu: I’m not entirely sure I understood what you’ve said, but the “Digg This” button on the top of the article is set up conditionally and automatically. It only appears when someone diggs my story. Check out the other articles on the site, you will see that most of them don’t have the button.
Btw, the button is not there to get more submissions. The button is there simply because I like to use it on other sites - it makes it simple for me to find a story and digg it. Since I use Digg as a sort of a link repository, this is really convenient, so I installed this plugin to give the same functionality to others.
Some nice points. But I wonder how many users are really gonna take care of these things. Digg users need to be more responsible. I feel Digg has become a place to trade links for webmasters. As far as the concept of Digg is concerned, I think it hasnt changed much. Chances are we will soon see something which is better than Digg.
@David
I’m going to echo your concerns. The more I become involved with other things, the less worried I am about maintaining my digg account. Hell, I’m even to the point at times where digging for some reason seems too much of a chore.
Is anyone else entering (or already in) the digg doldrums?
Digg is dead, buried, etc.
The majority of headlines are inaccurate, immature, or idiotic, at best.
I guess if you’re 14, it’s great, but people who like accurate information, should not waste their time.
digg users are a very feisty bunch and you can never tell the reason behind somebody marking your content as spam or just burying and worse posting comments like ‘blogspam’ and ‘marked as lame’ only to be dugg up by the other users who like to just mark it similar and digg up the comments like that.
I think I agree with ali on the quality of Digg users. In fact, as of late, the quality can be told by the popularity of “geeky babe” trend that has been spiking amidst all the “real” news. I started looking for a more trustworthy source of news and found that NewsTrust (http://beta.newstrust.net) is quite great. The NewsTrust project itself is led by Fabrice Florin, a former journalist and a digital media pioneer at Apple and Macromedia. As far as official, trustworthy news source, it’s great. If you are more into user-generated content, Digg will do for now. I know I still am - it’s far more entertaining.
Noone is two words.
Hey there,
Its interesting how your take on “do I submit my own blog” turned into a rant about the bury brigades on digg. While the fact that they exist, the fact that its easy to get your stuff buried, and the fact it might lead to your URL getting banned is certainly a possibility — I was actually thinking about the flipside.
If you are submitting your blog with the hopes that it Dugg, hopefully to the front page, then you should only submit your own blog if you have a high ranking and lots of friends.
I don’t think you can avoid getting a story buried in any case; if people have a beef, they’ll bury you anyway. What you *can* do is influence their success.
Make friends with someone with a high ranking — kindly ask *THEM* to submit your stuff; that’ll result in a higher chance of your stuff getting Dugg by tons of people than yourself — with the chance that your blog being buried being rather equal in all cases.
Cheers
t @ dji
Good article.
I think good, solid information and entertainment stands on its own. The Digg community isn’t stupid, so they know when someone has put work into something or are blog spamming.
I trust them (us).
Excellent article. I’m afraid I’m guilty as charged - largely through ignorance. Had no idea (silly silly me) it was simply not done to submit own content. Luckily the transparency of my faux pas is obvious as my username indicates my web site allegience. Thanks for clarifying for me and nicely written - temperment and attitude level just right!
R
I 100% agree with you. I hate the digg banning system. they would unban you but not unban your URL. And that is not fair. Sometime I think Kevin Rose takes himself too seriously…
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www.mostofmymac.com
I agree with this article wholeheartidly; unfortunately, you can’t do too much about the lack of general intelligence in people these days.
Firstly you have Digg employees who strictly follow a black-and-white policy without taking into account the “human factor.” Nor will they back down when proven wrong. Due to laziness and improper structure, they put all the power to “Digg as Spam” to their user-base. Let’s face it. Lots of people out there are idiots. They won’t take the time and effort to fully read your story or look at who submitted it if it even resembles “old news.” They puff up their chests and click the button that gives them the only sembelence of power in their routine little lives.
Look at the ratio of thought-out, intelligent responses to articles to meaningless dribble on Digg? Over half the comments that get “Dugg down” are actually better than the ones with Diggs.
Alas, cynicism will get me nowhere so I’ll end the rant with this: Sure Digg is a great way for your story to get noticed, regardless of the actual merit of your content (more people are interested in how to make the ultimate paper airplane than say Amnesty International’s latest humanitarian efforts). The only way to truly be heard is to not speak at all. Digg, and all social networks for that matter, are only as valuable as their user-base. That puts all the control into the user’s hands.
Too bad we’re all too laid-back to do anything in this day and age. Heck, look at the most hated man on the planet running the most powerful country and the crap he gets away with. ‘Nuff said.
You bring a great point here, when do you decide to post your own stuff?
How will it be treated?
How many friends do you have on Digg who would digg your stuff no matter whether it’s any good or not, just to get on the top of the list?
Kudos.
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!!!
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Hey, loved this post. I am still not sure whether to submit my own original work or leave it to others. I agree that you should be able to share your work as well as others with the people in your community. When I have submitted my own work, I let people know I want them to check out what I just wrote and if they like it to pass it on. I assure them it’s not spam and hope for the best.
I have been thinking about creating another digg user account and using that to submit sites. What do you think about this idea?