Digg’s Banning/Unbanning/Burying Policy Needs Help
A few weeks ago, I was shocked to find Zeropaid.com had been banned from Digg for “spam.” I don’t have the exact quote for reference here, but I recall it being something like “This domain has been widely reported for spamming the digg community.”
Let me explain a little bit about our news and how we promote stories on Digg and elsewhere. We employ an editor and staff of talented and dedicated writers to generate our exclusive technology news. We are included in Google news and have been linked to from such illustrious sources as WSJ, MSNBC, Wired and more. Naturally we want to give that news as large an audience as possible, and getting a front page Digg is something highly prized by the writers on our staff, kind of a badge of honor or at the very least recognition that others value their work. So we submit our most worthy stories to digg, and a couple of our staffers will digg it. We do not have any duplicate accounts or an army of diggers. We do add digg badges to the stories we submit so our readers can interact and cast their vote if so they choose.
So shocked as I was (and frankly a little hurt : - ) about Zeropaid being branded as “spam,” I wasn’t too worried. After all, we don’t spam and Digg is one of the good guys right? This was just a case of our competition falsely reporting us right? Sure enough, I think our editor sent an email and *poof* we were unbanned. Cool, right? Wrooooooong!
After being reinstated, we have submitted a few stories to the normal digg reaction, everything going good up until about 30 diggs, and then wham we get buried. I shurgged it off and told the guys to try harder. I did do some research, and found that some people were complaining about being buried after being unbanned. Hmm maybe there is more to this.
Come yesterday, our editor Jared posted a great article on P2P in China. We submitted it to digg last night and crossed our fingers. Sure enough, BURIED after 30 or so diggs. See for yourself:
http://digg.com/tech_news/China_Taking_P2P_to_the_Next_Level
We DID however get a full mention and link on TechCrunch which was cool. I was bummed about the burying but still wasn’t ready to complain. But then I saw the TechCrunch article get submitted and eventually make it to the homepage. Enough is enough, I say!
When you submit an article on Digg, the second of four rules is:
Link Directly to the Source: Save people time by linking directly to the original news story.
Kevin Rose had a dream of Digg, and this is not it! This is not it! (sorry for my lame Gladiator reference) It’s not fair that another author gets the credit when my editor was the guy busting his ass, and it’s not fair that another site gets the revenue boost and link love of a front page digg. We didn’t break the rules, but we sure got hosed. Notwithstanding the cool backlink from TechCrunch, thanks guys.
Oh well we will continue to do what we do and produce great original technology news regardless of Digg, but nevertheless I feel it is their responsibility to address these issues. Yes they need to police the community to combat the ever rising tide of spammers, but doing what they are doing now is like tapping everyone’s cellphone to catch Osama.
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Hey Chrish, Thanks for your comments on blendworx.com. I can understand after reading this article what you are saying about Digg. Yes, it’s not cool that someone else should get credit for recopying information and making Digg frontpage. It could be a better system. When you say you submit only your most worthy stories to Digg, that seems reasonable. Its not as if you are making a shout to people every 5 mins to digg something. I am not sure entirely what your strategy has been, however it may be best to have others that are on your Digg friend list with a little more pull in the community submit them for you. If people see what you have Dugg and all it mainly is, is from certain websites they may get upset. Are you doing others favors by digging their stuff and then sending a shout to let them know sometimes? This will help you know by their reaction who is friendly and who is not. Hope this helps a bit. Digg takes a little more effort unfortunately because a lot of people will consider you a spammer even though you are very moderate with your shouts.