Top Digg User Banned for Submitting a Story

Svetlana Gladkova,


Do you ever feel dumbfounded about seeing something strange going on on Digg, trying to find the explanation in TOS or FAQ - but without any results, of course? Recently it is too often that we see good stories buried without any evident reason. Blogs that had a couple of their posts on the front page daily rarely have a post or two in a week to reach the front page's heaven. Why?

It looks like Kevin Rose pursues his activities aimed at making Digg a better (more difficult to game, at least) place: Digg is said to finally have a mechanism in place to determine group voting and remove the stories. Anyone actually thinks there's not place for gaming now? Instead we have another form of gaming Digg - you bury the stories of your competitors when you can not promote your own.

Sure, we have all heard about the Bury Brigade. But some of us are geeky enough to start a deep research. The results of such a research by David LeMieux were postedby Muhammad Saleem on his blog yesterday. It is hard to tell that the story actually proves the existence of the BuryBrigade at all. But it is definitely thought-provoking. Do people have the right to provoke other people's thoughts? If we are not in Egypt, I think the answer is yes. Do people have the right to submit what they think interesting to Digg? I thought so, at least.

It proves that those who have the right to ban users from Digg think different. The surprise lies in the fact that one of the top Digg users Supernova17has been banned from Digg - presumably (let us know if you find another reason) for submitting this storyabout the Bury Brigade proof to Digg.

Comments are a very absorbing reading. Self-pronounced member of the bury brigade (or maybe actually a member) Blackolivepromised that they would start watching Supernova himself because of submitting a post, cried something out about a revolution about the ruling class of top diggers and called Supernova17 to negotiation (all speaking to himself, by the way - no one ever answered him though his comments did not get buried) - but even if Supernova was willing to start any negotiations (which I actually strongly doubt) he had no time because shortly after this comment his account was banned. It looks like Kevin Rose keeps his promise to continue with the measures aimed at preventing manipulations taking place on Digg (see our chat about removing with another top digger here)

I don't know if the usual "Like this story - Digg it" is a good advice here: what if they ban Profy forever for writing something this outrageous.

UPDATE: Supernova17 unbanned. Many of Digg users think he was banned for submitting a duplicate story. This really sounds like truth. BUT does not it seem strange banning and unbanning a user without any comments to share with the community? Isn't Digg all about community after all?


If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to profy RSS feed!
9 Comments (Subscribe to rss)
  • A Tribute to the Unsung Heroes of Digg (Bury Brigade Top 50)…

    I’m sure some of you have noticed a big story today of how David LeMieux uncovered the name of Digg users executing buries through a Digg flaw thanks to Muhammad Saleem’s report. The flaw was patched shortly giving David access to 1700+ bu…

  • Some of the other users said they think he was banned for a simple duplicate submission. I’m not sure if the story being submitted was what got him banned, because it was a duplicate of the same story submitted by BloodJunkie, who has not been banned.

  • Well, i see all the time very good stories, that doesn’t get even close to frontpage, and i allways thought that was very strange. Digg should be voted by ALL users, not by the TOP users. That kind of users are a the “modern mafia”, and i call them spammers!

  • Roland, I can not agree with you: they are not mafia, they are people who take Digg as a very time-consumeing activitiy, almost like a job. Besides, they know their way around Digg - while very few of other diggers actually do. I don’t think there’s a reason to be SOOOOOOOOOOO sharp to them.

    Jeremiah: I have not seen any duplicate story, to tell you the truth. And I got the idea for the post from this Netscape link http://donoevil.netscape.com/story/2007/02/28/digg-topuser-baned-for-posting-story-digg-bury-brigade-exists-and-heres-my-proof/. Where’s the duplicate story? And how could Supernova17 (with his incredible digging experience) submit a duplicate link? Maybe it was only several minutes between the two submissions or something?

  • There are so many duplicates on digg. Hell, every user has probably submitted one in the past just because the story had a slightly different querystring or something of the sort. But I’ve never heard of anyone being banned for a duplicate.

  • But if it actually duplicates the link to the blog post itself, it will definitely be determined. And I have not heard of such sudden bans for duplicates as well :)

  • News Flash! Digg finds that too many people Digging a submission is equivalent to gaming the system! No more stories reach front page! Film at 11…

  • HMTKSteve: lol :) :) :)

  • I wonder if I will get banned for submitting my own stories when I first started? You can laugh Svetlana :) I know Steve will :0

Leave a comment (We support avatars from Gravatar, MyBlogLog, and FriendFeed)