No Point In Banning

2006-12-28T13:11:00.000-08:00

I was on reddit.com the other day and I saw a story:

Website gets OWNED when someone gets it banned from digg

It was a link to a comment someone named "Mr. F" left on Graywolf’s SEO Blog

The blog post was entitled: How to be a Dirty Digger It was about getting websites banned from digg.

Apparently this Mr. F already knew how to do this so he/she had gone around trying to ban websites and he/she explained in great detail just how easy it was to do so.

From the post:

"(The Mark) I found a link to a website that someone posted on a popular gaming forum. I had never herd of this website before, the Alexa ranking was not great but is was in the top 100k.

For the record the website link I submitted to digg was interesting and would have probably made it to the front page if I worded it right instead of sabotaging it.

(The Setup) It was real easy all I did was put the domain name “myebid.com” in the title. I think that did the trick, instead of diggers just burying it I saw it getting marked as spam instantly via digg spy.

(The Ban) To make sure the story didn’t just get buried and to make sure the site got banned I singed up with Ten different hotmail accounts and then dugg the story. In an hour my accounts were closed and the website was successfully banned.

(The Conclusion) While I’m not exactly sure if it was digging my own story or making it look like spam, I do know it was real easy to get the site banned. It’s funny too because diggers always submit links to BS stuff from sites like ebay and others but because the sites are so well known diggers just mark the stories as lame and not spam. I know a few people that have tried to get ebay auctions to the front page of digg just to get the counter up, if that’s not spam what is."

Its sad when a great site like digg can be so easily manipulated, imagine all the things people could do to the credibility of digg. If people are defrauding digg to ban sites then you know they must be doing it to make other sites and stories popular or to make themselves popular for that matter. I think digg is becoming some kind of joke site, what's the point of banning a site anyway.

Wasn't the point of digg to promote good stories and bury bad ones, to let the people choose what's good and bad, what does banning have to do with that? If a few people don't like something or don't agree then a story can just be banned. Last I checked digg only had 3 choices: digg, bury and undigg and they should stick with that, I never saw a ban button anyway.