I wrote a post last week where I looked at all the different ways one of my URLs was saved to del.icio.us because of various reasons:
http://engtech.wordpress.com/2007/02/28/how-to-save-urls/

But I find it very hard to believe that this is the work of a group who hates these blogs, and monitors Digg’s activity for submissions from certain domains. Some of the stories from the previously banned websites have been buried at 1 vote, literally within minutes. Some of these stories were very neutral in nature. I’ve been an avid digger for a long time, and I have never noticed outbursts of hate towards certain domains unless the stories were really controversial/pornographic/spammy.

Like you say, Digg’s population is vast, but only a tiny fraction of that population monitors upcoming stories as they appear. And I can give you a list of a hundred domains (including deepjiveinterests) that have absolutely all their stories buried in the last 7 days. I think that there might be a bury here and there, but it must be helped by a big push from Digg.

Whether this push is in the form of a black flag, or an algorithm which severely punishes certain aspects of a domain (previous buries, previous banning, etc), I cannot say, but it’s unfair as it doesn’t seem to apply to A-list sites which get tons of buries too, as can easily be seen on Digg spy.

I don’t think it exists; rather, its a combination of a sophisticated burying algorithm (I’mi sure that the ease of burying something varies with how recent something is and other factors, such as how many existing votes it has, plus the domain’s history of buries etc) + the absolute hatred that people have for the URLs you mention and/or the topics they represent.

You wondered whether or not its possible for people to monitor certain kind of URLs people submit? Well, it is possible as you can follow the RSS feeds of any search term — and you just have to search for the domain of choice to follow it.

You make tons of good points and hypotheses; however, I think at the end of the day we underestimate the shear loathing a subset of the Digg population has for blogs — in general. I’ll try and dig up some examples, but every now and again, it appears in teh comments portion of a dugg blog post. And since Digg is so large, it only needs a tiny sliver of a sliver of people to feel the same way, and bury it.

Cheers
t

I cannot prove this, but based on very extensive testing (read my post on 901am), it’s a new concept introduced by Digg which enables silent banning of websites they don’t like. Basically, your domain doesn’t get banned, but everything submitted from it will get buried within minutes.

It’s hard to determine what exactly can cause a domain to get to this status (except the obvious: previous banning), but it’s possible that every little bit counts: bad titles, regular buries, controversial topics, too many submissions from the same domain, intentional duplicates (as you call it, black bird).

So, webmasters have absolutely no control on who submits their stories to Digg, and yet it can probably result in a silent ban.

(I’m going to shorten the rant now, don’t want to have a 5-page comment (;. If you want more information on this topic, please contact me via e-mail)

The bottom line is that the new system is horrible, and there’s no good way to protect your site from it because you depend on submissions from others.