Diggtatorship at Digg?
The first thing that I think of when thinking about my “missing” article that all people should see is, “What happened to the user driven concept of digg”?
Are we not able to question the viability of Digg without repercussion? My article is still on digg (Will Digg 3.0 bury the Digg effect) but when you search for it, it is nowhere to be found? It is neither in the upcoming stories nor the cloud view. It is neither part of the buried stories nor posted stories. However, the story at one point reached 28 votes. It was just about to make it to the front page!
I read an article the other day that brought some questions to my mind and for asking the questions digg censored my story and banned the member who posted the story to the digg website. I simply read an article that made me think and for that I have been displaced by an unknown and non transparent process.
With this type of diggtatorship (dictatorship) occurring what makes Digg any different than any other editorial driven news services? This was to be a site where your articles could be posted and viewed by all no matter what the content is, but it seems when something Digg does not like goes front page they have a way to burry it. I call on Digg to answer these questions and tell us how articles make the front page and then disappear from the face of the earth? If what I am claiming is not true then the digg users must be biased. Biased enough that they vote down anything that makes digg looks vulnerable. This exactly was one of my point on the previous article. Will digg members make digg go to the right or to the left?
During this time, I was following few discussions on a forum that had gone into deep discussion about "why digg should allow people to promote their stories that they've posted on digg".
You can find the thread here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=105564
Digg banned many of these users because they digged each others stories and asked others to digg their stories as well. Now, really what is wrong with asking other people to read your story and cast their vote? Didn't this voting system exist on the internet for over a decade now? I mean what were those entire "top site" ranking sites have been doing?
So digg decided to ban all these users who were self promoting their stories on forums and through other means. If you stop for a moment and ask yourself one question: Who is really the winner when users self promote their stories on digg? I think the biggest winner is digg. The user may get one or two votes but the user is advertising digg for free! If the story is bad then digg shouldn't be worried because its own dedicated users should be able to bury the story. Then why ban a self promoting user? I think this is a big loss for digg. They will be the loosers on a long term.
My advice to digg:
1) If you think a user is abusing your system then warn them before you ban them. You do have their e-mail address that you verify when they signup. Forgot?
2) If you bury a story then let users know why the story was wiped off the face of digg. You need to share who buried it and digged it. So people don't walk away wondering...
3) If you are going to use your staff as editors then be upfront with people. Change your slogan, "user driven with slight help of kevin rose and his people". Something like that would do.
4) Don’t ban people's IP address. If people are in a shared network, you may be loosing more than one person. Sometime hundreds!
5) Don’t ever forget that this site started off as a user driven site.
So what do you all think? Where is digg going and what happened to my story? Will they survive by banning people (you've read the forum posts)? Basically in this post I am asking digg to be more transparent with the people who love to use their site on a regular basis. Yes there are bad apples in every democratic world. If there aren't any then there wouldn't be a balance.
