Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in Digg Town Hall: No “secret moderators”

Re: Digg Town Hall: No “secret moderators”

mathewi — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:34:02 -0000

I think those are some of the things that Jay and Kevin said they were
trying to work on -- responding to people whose sites had been
blacklisted incorrectly, or whose stuff was routinely duped or
whatever. How successful they will be remains to be seen, I guess --
and there's no question they need more customer support.

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 9:26 AM, Disqus

Re: Digg Town Hall: No “secret moderators”

bobcaswell — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:25:52 -0000

Mathew-

Regardless of how the magic algo works or doesn't work, there seems to be a common theme:

If you're a new or relatively unknown site, don't get on digg's front page too often. If you're Engadget or Ars, you're welcome to the digg front page anytime even if your posts are just one paragraph and simply link to the real story (that would be Engadget). For every other site in the world, that's often considered blog spam. But Engadget gets away with it every day, and diggers love it.

Also, this just goes to show how easy it is for someone unaffiliated with a site to help blacklist it. You have some good stuff here, but if I wanted to get your site blacklisted it wouldn't be hard. I'd just submit a post of yours to digg, every day, shout to my friends about it, and wait for your blacklist to happen. All without you being involved...

For all the supposed "diversity" happening behind the scenes, there's little diversity in the outcome.

Re: Digg Town Hall: No “secret moderators”

mathewi — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:17:01 -0000

Yes, but Jay said that the "diversity" algorithms supposedly prevent a
small group of people from doing anything -- whether it's mass-Digging
of links, or mass-burying.

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 1:24 AM, Disqus

Re: Digg Town Hall: No “secret moderators”

mathewi — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:15:02 -0000

Yes, you certainly are getting around :-)

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 3:39 AM, Disqus

Re: Digg Town Hall: No “secret moderators”

MG Siegler — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 03:38:21 -0000

Completely agree with the thought that cynics will remains cynics while fanboys will remain fanboys. Some attempts at straight-talk, some attempts skirting around issues. Status quo will remain status quo, but at least they are putting forth some effort now.

I'm turning into you, writing all over the place :)

Re: Digg Town Hall: No “secret moderators”

bobcaswell — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 01:23:44 -0000

I found it interesting that they did admit to having a blacklist of sites that is matched with the upcoming queue in an automated process. But then, don't worry, there's no "auto-bury." Well, I guess it's how you define auto-bury. To me, that sounds an awful lot like what I would consider to be "auto-bury."

But then, all they had to say is "fighting spam" and all is well. The crowd is appeased even if plenty of legitimate sites are auto-buried / blacklisted in the process.

Plus there was a quick nod to the "our hands are tied" excuse toward the end in reference to the fact that sometimes the digg crowd gets together and decides it hates certain sites/blogs. Too bad for those sites; they're not welcome by however many of the tens of millions of uniques it takes for the sites to be blacklisted/auto-buried (I'm guessing probably somewhere around .00001% of the community can decide what is permanently not wanted by everyone).

To recap, legitimate sites can be (and have been, just not Engadget or Ars Technica, of course) blacklisted / banned / auto-buried (pick your term) because they're a) mistaken as spam or b) rejected a couple times by an extremely small percentage of the community.