Steve O’Hear, whose blog you should read over at ZDnet on the Social Web, innocently picked up on my post yesterday, and innocently tried to run a poll about whether or not Top Diggers should be paid. Mr. O’Hear catalogued his adventures with interest, because after he set it up, he submitted it (he uses the word “dugg”, but “dugg” is more commonly used to describe “voting” … at least, that’s how I describe it). He goes on to describe what happened next:
Predictably the story quickly gathered momentum (Digg’s users enjoy stories about Digg), and after approximately 90 Diggs and 40 comments it had hit the front page …
(The odd thing is it still shows up in my profile as the only story I’ve submitted that has ever made it to the homepage.)
Now I know I’ve previously described Digg as a broken democracy, but I’ve never thought of it as a dictatorship. So what had just happened?
It turns out that my submission had been buried, but by who?
Based on this, it could simply be that Digg’s algorithm had just kicked into action; though it’s hard to understand why a story that’s been dugg 90 times in a few hours and has over 40 comments, can hit the front page before it gets buried.
Alternatively, did I witness Digg’s moderators in action?
No, Mr. O’Hear, all you saw was the Bury Brigade in action.
The “Bury Brigade” is a pejorative term that describes a group of like minded individuals of varying connections who are bound formally or informally by a desire to NOT see certain stories on Digg.
Some groups hate the thought of blogs appearing as submissions, because they believe all blog posts to be “spam”; others, don’t want to see Apple stuff, and will bury that as “lame”; others yet, will have political agendas, liberterian, republican, or democrat, and will actively start marking down as bury-able any post to the contrary.
The most notorious group of individuals making up the “Bury Brigade” were gents (and possibly ladies) who believed that the top30 diggers were gaming Digg and monopolizing the front page, about 2 months ago. There was an active movement to quickly bury any story submitted by them, without any regard for what the content of the submission was.
Of course, the largest group of people who blindly bury posts are Digg boosters and supporters, who bury everything in site that is not positive about Digg.
In more than one circumstance posts on this blog have been submitted (and not even by me), for them to get a hardy number of votes, only for them to last about 90-120 minutes before getting buried.
Mr. O’Hear says “its hard to understand why a story that’s been dugg 90 times in a few hours and has over 40 comments can hit the front page before it gets buried” — in fact, that’s probably the fastest way to get buried, as that way it will get exposed to the most people (perhaps hundreds every minute during peak hours), and therefore, the most exposure to people who have grudges and agendas.
Here’s a few pages out of my own experience.
If you search for “deepjiveinterests” for the past 7 days, you will see there are no results.

In fact, to find them, you have to switch the “buried stories” radio button “on”.

Both of these stories, in 7 days, were submitted two other diggers, got a significant amount of diggs, reached the front page, and were promptly buried.
Its no surprise that both of them are critical of Digg in some fashion — and my cynical heart was not surprised that they got buried as they did. In fact,
If you would like to see the kind of vitriol that some of Kevin’s supporters have, don’t hesitate to visit this Digg page, where the DiggNation was out in force. The funniest comment was someone calling me a “turd burglar”.
No Steve, what happened to your submission was something that will happen with EVERY submission that is potentially critical of Digg that happens to reach the front page — it will get buried. Itt wasn’t the result of an algorithmic change, and it wasn’t a moderator change either (although I wish they would act as quickly — some notes on how they need to be much sharper can be found over here).
It was the Digg community doing what it does best.
Insulating itself from criticism.
tip: Mathew Ingram
[Of course, the REAL story will be when a bury brigade buries so many of a mainstream blog’s stories — for whatever reason — that it gets the URL of that mainstream blog or news site banned automatically as “Spam” … and the blog owner tries to get it re-instated. The adventures of a certain John Chow showed that Digg doesn’t check what URL gets banned, and relies on the community, possibly with an agenda, and its algorithms to show the way. The NYTimes.com getting banned? It could happen! Wikiality, indeed.]