I’ve just read two articles that highlight how poor Digg’s spam controls are, and how Digg is struggling to achieve its original mission of letting its users decide what gets on the homepage.

The first article gives some possible ways to get a competitor’s site banned. I’m certain that there must be people out there adopting these tactics, which include:

• When your competition publishes a new blog post, do them a favor and submit it on their behalf. Something with click poison all over it like ‘cool new idea’ or ‘Good post on www.example.com’ should do the trick
• Get a disposable email, preferably something like competitiorname@hotmail.com, nothing says I’m a complete spammer like a hotmail address. A hyphen in there will never hurt. Then every time they submit a blog post make sure you submit it to digg or netscape. Make your title’s drip with web 1.0 usability like ‘click here for great travel deals’ or ‘I made 1.21 Million Last year on EBay with these tips’. Keep it up until you get your account banned and the URL banned as well
• Still not satisfied, go to your local library or internet cafe set up 15 or so accounts on the same IP and ’self vote’ for stories from your competiton’s url
• Is there site still getting through then make sure you bury a story as soon as possible. Want to make sure you don’t miss one, link to an RSS feed for their URL so you know when something gets submitted. Send out a quick email or IM to 15 or so of your friends asking them to bury the story, that’s usually all it takes to make sure something never sees the light of day

The second post highlights the power of the top diggers to get a site buried or banned:

I recently learned from a top digg member that certain digg community members decided to start getting rid of SEO sites by emailing spam complaints to digg. These community members’ definition of spam blogs is not what you might think. As long as the site has to do with SEO, they apparently consider it spam because the digg community generally detests anything to do with SEO.

For me this is the biggest failing of Digg. Not only do these users wield far too much power in burying posts, but it is also far too easy for them to dominate the homepage. Because of this, Digg no longer features as much breaking news as it used to, and is full of top 10 lists, YouTube videos, Photoshop tips, Endless Firefox tips etc.

Good enough for Fridays, but not worth my Digg during the rest of the week.

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