Lately a discussion is going on among Digg users on whether Digg’s bury feature should be public, in the sense that everyone would see who buried which story. Regardless of the outcome of the debate, it turns out that the bury feature already is public. Muhammad Saleem over at Pronet Advertising, together with David LeMieux has discovered a way to see who buried which story. Muhammad tells me that it is no longer possible to do this, but it is still possible to analyze already gathered data.

Needless to say, it was easy to spot some indications of the legendary bury brigade - a popular name for users who go about burying every story that doesn’t fit their idea of what Digg’s front page should contain. To me, there was never a trace of doubt that some users will simply go and bury stories regardless of their quality, based on personal preferences, title they don’t like, or something else. However, the interesting thing would be to actually catch bigger groups working together to eradicate entire topics they don’t want to see on Digg. I’m looking at Digg Spy quite often, and as far as I could see such occurences are rare. But with more and more political stories on Digg, which are obviously being buried a lot by those with opposing political views, it might become a real problem for Digg, and this latest development will - if nothing else - raise some more awareness about this issue.