Digg Dugg Its Own Grave
I’ve been banned from Digg. I used to love Digg, but I’ve done something to Digg it didn’t like. I’m now an “invalid user.” Digg you’ve dugg your own grave; you’re no longer run by users, but robotic editors. And It’s editing content and denying the existence of an editor that killed you. It’s also the ease of dirty digging, like hurting your competition’s website that kill you.
Many of you have heard of the Digg Auto bury, it’s the editorial-robot killing hundreds of great stories every month. It’s the robot that kills most of forevergeek.com, johnchow.com, copyblogger.com’s stories — and now it killed my user name.
But don’t ask digg about autobury, it still believes “Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content.”
Yet, Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, explains the autobury feature of digg, “When a single URL hits a threshold of reports, our standard procedure is to block that URL from submission.” If automatically blocking a URL from digg isn’t editing content, what is?
Stefan Juhl researched the idea of internal edited and found the “last referrer before the [bury] was crawl3.digg.internal.” It’s an internal autobury indeed.
“Mostly, landing on the Digg front page a couple times a month resulted only in a server-shaking stampede of worthless traffic. But mixed in with the basement-dwelling little boys who momentarily refrained from Playstationing with their Wiis long enough to tell me I sucked, I picked up new subscribers,” said Brian Clark from Copyblogger.com.
And now you can get even more subscribers and visitors by digging your competitor’s graves. It’s extremely easy to kill your competing site on digg, just follow these steps to get his or her domain on autobury. It’s called “dirty digging.”
How to Digg Your Competitors Grave
1. Submit and Title Posts for Your Competition. And make the title standout, something like “Check this Post Out on Domain.com” or “This Was ReAlly Cool.”
2. Create a Free Email Account Using The Domain Name. Go to Yahoo or Hotmail and create an email (yourcompetition@hotmail.com). Now have the domain’s RSS feed and digg every new post, again using spam titles. Keep submitting only the domain’s posts until you get the domain banned.
3. Keep Creating New Accounts. Go to the library one day and create 15 or more new email accounts and digg accounts. Then submit posts only from your competitors domain.
4. Now Bury Each Post. Use an account that hasn’t submitted the stories and bury each one. And if you want a ban even faster, get 15 or more of your friends on digg to bury the stories.
5. Contact the Power Users. Again using a fake email, contact some power-users and ask them if they’re interested in getting paid to digg a list of stories. Be sure to list each post from your competitor’s site.
Along with how easy it is to use digg to do your dirty work, digg and all social media have reverted the trend back to individual blogs — where the blogger has complete control and can’t be banned. It’s this trend back to blogging that came from digg’s hypocrisy that killed it. Saying the users control the content seen on digg, then creating an autobury is hypocrisy.
As Lee Odden, a fellow blogger at toprankblog.com, explains, “The issue for me is when people try to submit a story they want to share with the digg community and get an error message ‘This domain name is banned from submissions’ it sends an inaccurate message. My complaint is not about being off of digg, its about someone else making that decision arbitrarily and digg support acting very much like DMOZ. And we all know where DMOZ ended up.”
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impNERD.com was banned as well because of it being ‘widely reported as spam’. Even though there has never been a piece of spam on it. There aren’t AdSense ads or anything else like that anyway to try to fool Diggers into visiting it, so why would it need to be spammed?
Internet marketing and business is just about the hardest thing to get to the front page on Digg. You have 10,000 other internet marketers burying the story before ever getting past the title. In the few cases I have gotten some Diggs (never gotten my own article to the front page, but have gotten other peoples) the click-throughs was horrible. Seemed more people liked to vote than actually click through. IMO Mixx and Reddit are way above Digg in this respect.