Thursday, December 28, 2006

No Point In Banning

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.

I hope they do something about this or it will just be another case of a great website getting to big for its own good.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here is the full story:

I had the same idea, I picked a random website and basically tested Graywolf’s theory on “How to be a Dirty Digger” here’s what happened:

(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.

While it’s pretty clear you can’t “game” digg in some ways, you sure can game it in others. I did get my story to the front page although it did get dugg down immediately. It topped out at about 35 diggs then made it to the front page and got spammed to death, some diggers even started to undigg it and my fake diggs got removed.

Digg has a real problem on its hands, it seems only 1% or so “the top diggers” have power over 95% of what happens on the site. It will only get worse as time goes on.

I think I will try and do it again but with another slightly more popular website, I have my eye on “woot.com”

Wish me luck and feel free to help!

P.S.
Sorry to www.myebid.com it wasn’t personal but someone had to go down.

Anonymous said...

Yup, if you post a good story it gets to the front page if you post a bad story it doesnt make it to the front page, its simple and really no point to ban a site.

Anonymous said...

I'm sure digg will fix any problems it has. Digg is to big of a site with lots of money behind them, they wont fail. Long live digg!

Anonymous said...

Digg sucks and so does Kevin Rose!

Anonymous said...

Who cares if digg bans a web site, digg ant every thing.