Digg Uproar: Zaibatsu Banned by Digg!!

This morning I went to Sphinn, for whatever reason, and found an entry called “Zaibatsu Banned By Digg“. This article led to a blog post by the same name,which happens to be on a blog I read every day. The blog post referenced an article called “I Was Banned From Digg and For a Pretty Lame Reason“, and it was a response by Zaibatsu to the recent Digg banning of his account. As I read the article, I could not help thinking about a recent blog post on Ashmadai’s Blog, entitled “Digg Uproar: Digg Bans Users” and the September 15th article on CSM called “The Digg Uproar Saga: Mr. Babyman and Blind Digging Cited As Culprits“.

After finishing the article by Zaibatsu I found myself a tad on the angry side, I don’t like getting angry — especially at 8:30 AM on a Saturday. What bothered me was the initial feeling that Zaibatsu was set up, what was really odd was the fact that Grateful Dead was siinging:

Busted, down on bourbon street,
set up, like a bowlin pin.
Knocked down,
it gets to wearin thin.
they just wont let you be, oh no.

I found this pretty funny, but strange at the same time.

At this point I went back to the Ashmadai Blog and found a link, my initial thought is that this links to a woman wby the name of Bridget Ayers, who has gone by the name of GetSmartGirl on Digg. I offer my apologies to Bridget if I gave too much information out about her, but I am not so convinced that she will mind — if I thought she would mind, I wouldn’t have given out the information. Anyway Ms. Ayers provided a list of approximately 82 names of Diggers who were banned by Digg over the past few days. It seems that the list is not complete for I’ve gotten reports of a few others who’s links to their Digg profile pages goes to the dreaded “Oops” page. Sorry Bridget, I didn’t keep the names and can’t recall any of them.

So I sat and contemplated what is going on at Digg, at this point it seems that Digg is undergoing a “Digg Smackdown“, but they are not using a new procedure during this smackdown. They are employing the same “No Notice, No Appeals” approach that they have used for months. Now the answer to the question of “Why is Digg having a Digg Smackdown?” doesn’t really matter, what matters is that they are trying to clean up the site to make it better for us all — including them. So what should Digg do? Well if they ask me, I’ll tell them. If they don’t ask me, I’ll tell them anyway. One of my philosophies is that “Everyone has a right to my opinion!”. LOL

The first thing Digg should do is change their code to where Buries only affects what the Digger clicking on the bury button sees in that particular account. It should have no other affect upon the Item. This doesn’t undermine the “Democracy” aspect that Digg may want to strive for in the least.. it only serves to stop a person or group from trouncing on the rights of others on Digg. You maintain the aspect of the Digger to not see what he or she wants to see, but at the same time it preserves the rights of other Diggers to see those same items if they choose to do so.

The second thing Digg should do is not allow any set-up where a digger, or group of diggers, can mark any item as spam. Spam often has different meanings to different people, what Digger A may view as Spam may not be what Digger B or Digg views as Spam. Instead only allow people to file Spam Complaints and then make your Staff and Management do their jobs of checking out these complaints to see if they are justified.

The third thing is that Digg should allow an appeals process for those banned. Digg might even set up a system to where the first banning is a certain number of hours or days, the second is longer, the third is deletion of the account… but that doesn’t mean that Digg can simply allow it’s members to dictate who gets banned and who doesn’t. That function is best left to the site owners and staff for they can apply their policies equally to all users and not just those being targeted by a particular group. \

The fourth thing is for Digg to insure they have a complete set of stats. They ought to keep stats for the number of buries by the member and compare that number to what the other stats show. If you have someone who was on Digg for 2 or more years that has 100 Submits, 20 Comments, 50 Shouts, and 50,000 buries… you then know you have a member of the Bury Brigade or Digg Mafia. People of this type of mentality are what psychologists used to call “Anti-Social” and they are more of a danger to Digg than 10,000 Diggers who are gaming the system.

The fifth thing to do is to fix the pages on Digg to where people can no longer go to Upcoming and other pages, click the 15 or 20 digg badges on the page within a few mere seconds, then more onto the next page to do the same. Digg allows this to be done, then they complain about users not “reading the article”. If Digg wants people to click through, make them click through and quit banning users for only doing what you allow them to do in the first place.

The sixth thing would be to allow only so many shouts and submitted items per hour. Sort of guide people into spending time commenting by not making the wait time too long, but make it short enough to compel people to stay on the site.

As far as submitted items are concerned, 2 per hour is a nice round number, 5 items per hour might be better.

As far as shouts are concerned, I suggest that since Digg allows 1,000 friends and the ability to shout all.. then allow people to shout everyone at once. The kicker is that Digg will only send out maybe 100 shouts per every 15 minutes. Digg could also probably set it up that if you sent a shout then you cannot send another for 15 minutes regardless of how many people you shouted in your last shout.

There are many more things that Digg can do to improve the system, but the one thing they have to realize is that you can’t please everyone. People will come and go, the key to a real successful site is in retaining the people who will do the best for your site and drive the trolls away. People will always have their complaints and it doesn’t matter how well your site is run. There will be personality clashes, some won’t like what another is doing, and you will always have someone who thinks they can manipulate the staff and management to get what they want. The final bit of advice I have is for Digg to not allow their obsession with people gaming the system to develop into an unhealthy phobia. People will always game a system because not everyone’s definition of it is the same, nor is it applied equally to everyone.