Top Digg User Banned for Submitting a Story
by
on February 28, 2007,
Do you ever feel dumbfounded about seeing something strange going on on Digg, trying to find the explanation in TOS or FAQ - but without any results, of course? Recently it is too often that we see good stories buried without any evident reason. Blogs that had a couple of their posts on the front page daily rarely have a post or two in a week to reach the front page's heaven. Why?
It looks like Kevin Rose pursues his activities aimed at making Digg a better (more difficult to game, at least) place: Digg is said to finally have a mechanism in place to determine group voting and remove the stories. Anyone actually thinks there's not place for gaming now? Instead we have another form of gaming Digg - you bury the stories of your competitors when you can not promote your own.
Sure, we have all heard about the Bury Brigade. But some of us are geeky enough to start a deep research. The results of such a research by David LeMieux were postedby Muhammad Saleem on his blog yesterday. It is hard to tell that the story actually proves the existence of the BuryBrigade at all. But it is definitely thought-provoking. Do people have the right to provoke other people's thoughts? If we are not in Egypt, I think the answer is yes. Do people have the right to submit what they think interesting to Digg? I thought so, at least.
It proves that those who have the right to ban users from Digg think different. The surprise lies in the fact that one of the top Digg users Supernova17has been banned from Digg - presumably (let us know if you find another reason) for submitting this storyabout the Bury Brigade proof to Digg.
Comments are a very absorbing reading. Self-pronounced member of the bury brigade (or maybe actually a member) Blackolivepromised that they would start watching Supernova himself because of submitting a post, cried something out about a revolution about the ruling class of top diggers and called Supernova17 to negotiation (all speaking to himself, by the way - no one ever answered him though his comments did not get buried) - but even if Supernova was willing to start any negotiations (which I actually strongly doubt) he had no time because shortly after this comment his account was banned. It looks like Kevin Rose keeps his promise to continue with the measures aimed at preventing manipulations taking place on Digg (see our chat about removing with another top digger here)
I don't know if the usual "Like this story - Digg it" is a good advice here: what if they ban Profy forever for writing something this outrageous.
UPDATE: Supernova17 unbanned. Many of Digg users think he was banned for submitting a duplicate story. This really sounds like truth. BUT does not it seem strange banning and unbanning a user without any comments to share with the community? Isn't Digg all about community after all?
