The Digg bury feature will kill the site, and depict social news in a very bad way

While stopping in a small shop for a pack of chewing gum today I ran into a reader of my blog. This has never happened to me before, but I just moved to a smaller city and launched a local blog with the name of the city in the title. This has helped me suddenly start ranking for city related keywords. In turn, many locals are finding this particular blog. As it turns out, this individual had seen my picture on the blog and knew who I was at first site. Weird no?

The gentleman works in IT at a local software firm, and was loaded with questions regarding what I do and how I find time to maintain so many blogs. It was all interesting dialog, but the real kicker is a discussion that came up about Digg.com. Apparently the guys in his office had been talking about it a few days earlier and they had all drawn the conclusion that Digg had hit its peak and would probably begin to see declines in the very near future. But not only that, he also felt Digg was putting social news in general into a very bad reputation.

I couldn’t agree more.

We both came to the firm agreement that Digg is now becoming a safe haven for spam and the front page is controlled by a minority of aggressive users. These users don’t control the front page by voting for stories. No, they control the front page by abusing the bury feature.

It’s no secret that Digg has what many users have come to call the “bury brigade“. This discussion has come up time and time again. It’s also no secret that the bury feature is arguably one of the biggest flaws of Digg to date. But up until now, or in a bigger picture, up until 2007, it wasn’t too big of a problem. Now, however, it is completely out of hand and dictates every bit if content that gets published to Digg’s servers.

Steve noticed something that should have everyone in the social news world worried.

I was paying attention to the gaming area of Digg and I noticed something. Certain websites that are always on Digg’s home page (in the gaming area) would have an article submitted and then, every other article on the same subject would start being buried. It did not matter which article came first.

This is clearly a case of Digg being gamed by selective use of the bury system and it is something Digg should take care of. They already watch for selective Digging, why don’t they watch for selective burying?

This is just one example out of thousands, but it is a simple look at exactly what is happening.

Let’s back up a bit and take a look at where the majority of the focus is directed.

The big news has been on the recent slew of online sources that pay people to Digg up stories. There is User Submitter, Surf Junky, and then the new, sneaky cat in town… Subvert and Profit.

They seem to be quite successful from I’ve found. John Chow opened an account last year and was presented with the following stories. All of which became popular.

-How to make money with YouTube Videos
-Spice Test
-Wii Hardware
-Completely Useless Inventions

So it’s very clear that Digg has been cheated on the voting front. But what about the bury side of things?

Let’s take a deeper look. First, Muhammad Saleem recently uncovered a gaping whole in Digg’s system that allowed him to look at the buries that were taking place.

While that system is supposed to be used to remove superfluous or irrelevant content from Digg, the mechanism is often abused to remove useful and insightful content by malicious users for self-serving and vindictive reasons.

He goes on to expose users who are blatantly abusing the bury system, and had he not broken in and obtained the data, we would never be able to prove it. But alas, the truth shall set us free.

You can see which user did the burying, on what story, and on what basis. By looking at just some of the data, you can get quite conclusive hard evidence that not only does the bury brigade exist, but it is hard at work burying any content that doesn’t suit its ideology.

Personally, I knew this was happening, but it’s encouraging to see proof, isn’t it? Muhammad provides examples of the buried stories, and as can be seen, sites that are clearly not spam are being buried as such.

Now let’s look at stories that have PLENTY of votes to make it to the front page, but the brigade has “unvoted” against the voters to keep them buried.

Disclosure: If you blow your top at any political story that goes against your belief, stop reading now. I’m posting these political stories as examples of my assertion. Nothing more. Like the content of these stories or not, you can’t denay they were blatantly buried because of partisan politics and illogical bias.

The flaw in Digg’s system is that they claim to be “democratic” in that the users drive the content and decide what content makes it to the front page by voting on stories. If that were the case, then why do “unvotes” take such higher priority?

Can you imagine this philosophy making it to US elections? What if while Americans were voting, there were also Americans “unvoting” for candidates? It simply would not work. Period.

You would have absolute madness under the scenorio mentioned above. You would have special interest groups sending thousands of people to “unvote” candidates with the hopes of burying them with a loss in the election.

It’s a completely unstable way of doing things, and in essence, anti-democratic. There for, it could be said that Digg is not at all democratic, simply because of the bury system.

For the sake of my argument, I’m going to use stories from political blog Little Green Footballs.

-Pelosi in a Hijab :: 189 Diggs
-KOS Seething at Obama :: 185 Diggs
-The Huffpo Manifesto :: 201 Diggs
-Popular Mechanics Responds to Rosie’s Mainstream Media Insanity :: 205

Many of you will probably disagree with the content in these posts. But if you have an ounce of logic in your brain, then you should be able to agree that even if you hate the content, many others do not and there for, those votes should count for something. If Digg is a true democracy, then the votes should decide the outcome. If story A gets enough votes it goes to the front page. If story B gets enough votes, it too should go to the front page. Simple enough, no?

So then, why is it that one of the posts mentioned earlier in this column (also conluded as Digg spam via a pay per Digg scheme), Wii Hardware makes it to the front page with only 47 votes?

The answer is simple. Digg is allowing the bury brigade to dictate what happens, regardless of what regular voting users desire.

There is no question that the Digg democracy died long ago.

Digg has now become UnDigg. Digg’s “how it works” page should read like this.

—-

Discover media online. Find an article, video, or podcast online and submit it to Digg.com. Your submission will immediately appear in “Upcoming Stories,” where other members can find it and, if they don’t like it, UnDigg it.

Get popular. Once a submission has earned a critical mass of UnDiggs, it is ripped from “popular” and jumps to the bottomless pit in its category.

Digg. Participate in the collaborative, yet often useless editorial process by Digging the stuff that you like best. As you Digg, you could possibly contribute to the count on any given item. You also build a profile of Diggs that your friends can view.

UnDigg. If you find stories with bad links, off-topic content, or duplicate entries, click “Bury.” That’s how we decide what REALLY makes the front page.

—–

The guy who I met in the store went as far as to set up an account on Digg, but after reading a few stories like this one decided that social news was a good idea in theory, but would fade because of this new vibe that has taken over.

I think a lot of people are starting to see this, and it isn’t good for social bookmarking in general. Bad PR at this level could tear down the entire idea, which was brilliant in its original form.

It was great while it lasted, but I guess it’s time for something new. UnDigg is simply losing its touch.

-Eric Odom

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