Well, well, well. It looks like the SEO community started noticing Digg (not necessarily a bad thing), and Digg started noticing back . And in the dustup, it looks like they all learned a harsh lesson that John Chow learned a few months ago : Digg’s definition of Spam is completely relative.

Completely relative to what?

Completely relative to what the Digg community’s definition of “Spam” is. And this roughly equates to what it doesn’t like. Spam has often been associated with unsolicited email — but much like the term “Nazi”, its grown to encompass a great many things beyond its initial definition.

Here’s a recap: On Digg, “Spam” is reporting is completely voluntary, and to my knowledge, completely automated. As I initially reported int he “John Chow” incident, Digg depends on its users to report spam, much like they depend on it to submit and vote on quality content. I suppose they should be applauded for trying to keep a certain degree of symmetry here, but just like they take a laissez-faire and hands-off approach to the submission and voting up of content — they take an equally hands off approach to the flagging of “Spam” content.

People can routinely label any submission they want as “Spam”, “Lame”, “Duplicate”, “Inaccurate”, and “Wrong Topic”. When a submission getes enough “buries” under these categories (the number is yet to be defined), it gets taken off the frontpage if its in the frontpage, and it becomes impossible to find by “searching” unless you hit the “buried” radio button to search buried topics.

If enough stories from a given URL is buried, that URL gets banned. Automatically.

What does “banned” mean? It means that Diggers get a message saying something to the effect of “That URL is banned” any time they try and submit something FROM that URL to Digg. Unless extraordinary measures are undertaken, quite often it is almost impossible to un-ban a URL.

So what’s the problem with all of this?

Well, the problem is that Digg moderates “bury” votes about as well as it moderates its Digg submissions — and that means its lousy to the point of being ineffective.

If you listen to Kevin Rose on a recent interview at Net@Night a few weeks ago with Leo Laporte and Amber Mac, he actually tells you (roll to about 21:15) what their moderation system is like. It involves a couple dudes (or dudettes) in Europe (Sweden?) who work in shifts.

“We have someone who watches the day and someone who watches it at night  … that person’s in the Netherlands, so it makes things easier… there’s 4-5000 newly submitted stories; there’s no way any one individual could go through that and police the content … depending on the number of Diggs and the topic its submitted to, a certain number of buries are required for it to be pulled from the frontpage or queue … it really is up to the community to yank the content”

TWO people moderating over 5000 submissions a day.

Kevin doesn’t tell you how many emails they get declaring a URL is spamming Digg; and he doesn’t tell you how many URLs a day are flagged as “ban-able”. But I would suggest that it is probably a significant number, that when added to that 5000 they have to check, such that they NEED to depend on their trustworthy community to help them “police” itself.

Of course what happens THEN is that people who have particular ideas of what is “Spam” can get perfectly reasonable non-Spam sites banned.  Its just a matter of “burying” enough posts from a particular URL *or* getting enough people to complain that a site is “spam” to get the job done.

An ungentlemanly way of saying this is that Digg is too damn lazy to police its content.

The worst part is that there is essentially no way to get this reviewed in an effective or timely fashion.  Particularly if you a) have no contacts within the “Digg” community b) don’t know anyone behind the scenes at Digg or c) are not a web “personality” yourself.

As I said in a post or two ago, the issue of different “bury brigades” is only one of three issues that have yet to be dealt with seriously. 
In part, the power of these different “bury brigades”, in all its forms, is really a symptom of one of its larger problems — and that is, what happens when a social bookmarking site gets that large.

When a social bookmarking site gets that many votes, and that much traffic, its not only important to support things from a technical point of view (anyone else notice how SLOW Digg is?), but from a personnel point of view and operations point of view.

Because clearly TWO people aren’t enough to moderate submissions and bans for a site that operates 24h a day.  You have to have enough people to:
a) to review bans manually, and to actually THINK and look at the URL – and decide in a fair and transparent manner if it is in fact a URL worthy of a “Ban” (without any kind of notice)

c) For “Bans” in dispute, for there to be an effective way of resolving things — quickly, and again, transparently.

Clearly Digg’s current method of determining, and then acting on, “Spam” urls is broken.

Its “2.0″ methodology of relying on the community to “police” itself is an odd combination of sheer laziness and lagardness.  For things to improve, they must put the manpower and resources into resolving these issues, recognizing, perhaps, that not all things can be solved by a mighty algorithm and a couple of dudes in their boxer shorts.