Digg loses

I’m sure a few of you have seen a couple things unfold in the past day or so surrounding one of the most popular stories on Digg being deleted - and even the submitting Digger having his user account banned. If you bother to take a look at the Digg homepage now, you’ll most likely see that the top stories are actually related or exactly the same as the story that was originally removed.  In fact, the number one story right now is "Digg Banned me for Typing a Number!". The original submitter was CJ, who details his account of what happened on his own site here. What we’re seeing is a backlash from the users of one of the most popular, if not THE most popular "user-driven social content websites" in the World. In addition, Digg’s current Top 10 is filled to the brim with users voting on HD-DVD stories which have the very key that was removed in the original Digg article.

UPDATE: Looks like Digg and Kevin Rose have caved into the tremendous amount of pressure from it’s users. He has in fact created this story, which has the HD DVD key in it. It’s also currently the #1 story on Digg with over 23,000 "Diggs"…

In fact, Digg has the following to say about itself, "Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on Digg is submitted by our community (that would be you). After you submit content, other people read your submission and Digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of visitors to see." Well, not really guys. Not if you have a team of moderators that run around deleting stories that you personally don’t like or are being paid by a company that you want to keep a rosey relationship with. Just like the HD DVD Group who sponsored your DiggNation vidcast, and now coincidentially the story that got deleted was about the HD DVD key being hacked and broadcasted to the entire world to see. "Administrators have also apparently begun deleting stories criticizing their actions, and also banned numerous members – according to angry statements posted by Digg users on the site and elsewhere." You posted on your blog that, "We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention", yet there are countless other stories with the code still on the homepage. This is not by any means the first time something like this has happened, and is quite ridiculous. Jason Calacanis had some great points about some of the sneaky, and shameful ways of Digg. He actually details their scam on his blog in detail. There is no trace to who "buried" stories meaning who voted it down. Except the problem with this is, unlike the positive voting scheme, there’s no name attached to whoever "buried" a story leaving it open for moderators, and anyone else with the right access to completely hide any story that they felt necessary. There is abolsutely no accountability, and really isn’t what we’d like to call an "open" social network. Another excellent Calacanis point, you can’t comment on Digg’s own blog. "Hello!??!!? How can you be for social media and audience empowerment and not let folks have a discussion on your blog?!" Horrible way to gain a visitors trust and honestly, from a marketing point of view, one of the stupidest things to do, especially not admitting to it, and coming clean with everything. I don’t really give a crap about Digg, I personally never liked the site and couldn’t care less if people voted or "Dugg" stories we published. Afterall you are just reaching your same target audience anyway when your story appears on Digg. I do however make a point to be as upfront with you as possible, and if wrong, correct the problem in question immediately. We will be removing all "Digg This!" type buttons and anything relating to Digg in the following day or so. I’m actually adding a "Scrape This" button to our RSS feeds now. Do I expect the world to follow? No, but personally this is the move I feel we should make.

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