May 9th, 2007 - By: Alex Bailey
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If by some odd chance you missed the Digg revolt news on your RSS reader, the basic summary can be found at TechCrunch. The basic story is that Digg surrounded to a mob after it spammed the HD DVD processing key on all stories. They did this in order to protest Digg's decision to censor the key and ban users who have posted it.
However, despite Kevin's claims that the censorship is over, I have a very good hunch that he is lying. First of all some background information. Back in March, a bunch of users were causing a stir over "Digg bury brigades", and how a handful of domains (including mine) were innocently being banned. In a blog post, Kevin wrote:
We have tweaked some systems so that Digg is now able to be much more granular in the way it blocks offending content, so that Digg doesn't necessarily need to block entire domains or subdomains. Apologies to any sites we've inconvenienced with our previous system.
Essentially what Digg did was unban a good portion of the offending domains (again, including mine). By his second sentence it appears they've tweaked the algorithm to make it more efficient in finding people that are gaming Digg. In essence he's saying the algorithm has improved and he doesn't need to block domains anymore.
Now for my theory. I believe they've simply tweaked the algorithm to automatically bury a story submitted by the previously banned domain after a random period of time. If you submit a story with the techreads.com domain, it will be buried. There is no question about that. However, what's odd is that if it gets 220 Diggs in a few hours, it'll be buried. If it gets absolutely no Diggs, and draws absolutely no attention and maintains a low profile; it will still be buried. How can it be that a story that has no activity on it, with no Diggs is getting buried?
Before a week ago, this was just a hunch of mine. However, during the HD-DVD riot everything having to do with the key was put on front page by users; except for my story, thus confirming it for me. I submitted an image to Digg, which managed to get over 220 Diggs in a a little over an hour. All other stories in the upcoming queue had less than my story except for one. All of a sudden all of the stories in upcoming disappeared and went on the home page. All of them except mine. Doing a quick search, I found it it was...you guessed it...buried. What are the odds of a story that gained 230 Diggs in a little over an hour getting buried? I believe that's slim to none, considering the content of the front page at that time. During that night there was a gay porn site (link to Digg article) on front page, massive blog spam, and even a parked domain page. However, my story that was a direct image with absolutely no ads disappears? Heh very unlikely.
Doing some investigating you can see that absolutely all of my submissions after the date the ban was "removed" have been buried. It doesn't matter of the story had 4, 7, or 220 Diggs, all of them are mysteriously vanishing.
