Every time I want to turn and write something positive about the darling of the Web2.0 set, something like this happens and just turns my keyboard to an about face. John Chow, self proclaimed Internet Mogul, and former Ultimate Fighting Championship contestant recently got his blog banned from Digg. Now, for some who have been following John’s bloggerrific adventures, they might say “Thank God, its about time” — as John has gotten a huge number of his posts to hit the front page of Digg. But no matter what you might think about his blog or his tactics, the content of his site certainly is not spam. He’s not posting about organ enlargement, mortgage refinancing, or the latest pump and dump schemes.

He’s not even posting on something off-topic in hopes of getting link-baited right on to Digg (such as “Losing weight” on a dental site).
What is really exceptional, however, is how he got banned. To quote an email from John posted right to his site:

When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. The domain will not be unbanned. The domain would consistently get reported as spam otherwise. Please review our FAQ (digg.com/faq) for more information.

–digg support

So it looks like Digg has an automatic “Ban” function, where if enough posts which are submitted are marked “spam” and are actually “buried” (that is to say, gone from Digg except if you search for them clicking on the “search buried” radio item, or put in the URL of the submission right into the browser) your URL could be banned — regardless if the content is actually spam or not.

John alleges that it is as few as 10 submissions that when buried as “spam” could land your URL being banned, and wonders whether or not it could be as few as 10 “marked as spam” per submission that can bury a submission.

Now, over this quiet Thanksgiving weekend, there’s been quite the hubaloo about Jason Calacanis proving that Alexa’s old and busted (which, quite frankly, is no news at all), but can you imagine the kind of abuse that could go on with Digg if this aspect of its automagical algorithm is true? Or, if a group of individuals went out to “prove” that it were true?

For example, could we get TechCrunch, banned, I wonder?

Its not a stretch to imagine that I could pretty much submit 10 or more of posts / stories / URLs from any particular site, then set up enough puppet accounts to mark them as spam and bury them all. Poof — on the road to automatic banning.

We already know that Digg’s self-policing function is quite frankly, dysfunctional. The “bury” feature, rather than helping Digg police itself, has rather led to groups of individuals burying posts for their own reasons (conspiracists would use the word “agenda’s”). Its almost like gaming in reverse — rather than using a bunch of systems to game Digg’s algorithm for promoting a site … you’re using Digg’s algorithm to prevent it from ever being promoted. In fact, you’re using the algorithm to get a site banned form Digg.

Hmmm — individuals working as a group with a common goal to get an individual URL banned.

Almost sounds like digital vigilante-ism working together in a mob-like fashion, doesn’t it?

Now, I don’t know if the 10/10 rule is true; but the scary fact is that in principle the whole story IS true — get enough people complaining that a site is spam through Digg’s own machinations and you can convince Digg that it is indeed spam. According to an email to John, Digg furthermore goes on to say that they won’t un-ban it, because it would just keep on getting reported as spam.

That’s right.

It almost sounds like a small group of individuals with an agenda can force Digg’s reality to turn on its head because Digg can’t be bothered figuring out what the “Truth” is. Or rather, they would conveniently allow truth-by-consensus, than investigating what the problem really is.

Om Malik mentioned about how fashionable it was to trash Digg these days; to that I would say I keep on looking for something positive to write about, but this is the only stuff that keeps on coming up! Of course its a private company, but as one of the biggest Web2.0 companies out there, it puts itself in the scrutiny of others. And surely I’m not the only one asking asking questions like, where is the accountability? Where are the checks and balances? Is what they’re doing right?
More often than not, the answers are “not very much”, “it exists, but its lousy”, and “I don’t want to answer that”.

tip: themulife