For a long time there has been indirect evidence that there is a group of Digg users who deliberately bury posts from sites that they don’t like or doesn’t match their ideology, and particularly posts from blogs. Well, finally there is proof thanks to Pronet advertising, who used Digg’s own Diggspy tool to track who is burying posts.

The digg bury mechanism is designed to allow users to stop poor on inaccurate submissions from hitting the homepage. Digg doesn’t display who has buried a post or even how many times a post has been buried, even though it does show who has dugg each post. According to Jason Calacanis this was so that Digg staff could bury posts without anyone knowing:

This was done in the early days, from what I was told from insiders, so that the staff of digg could kill stories they didn’t like and blame it on the will of the community. This kept the digg staff’s fingerprints off of things that were killed so the staff of digg could say “we didn’t kill it, the community did.”

Pronet Advertising managed to prove that there is a group of digg users who are working together to bury posts by writing a script that worked on top of Digg Spy to reveal previously hidden information of who was burying which posts.

By looking at the data that they managed to obtain before Digg shut down access, they were able get conclusive proof that not only does the bury brigade exist, but it is hard at work burying any content that doesn’t suit its ideology. Some examples were given of posts about Microsoft and Sony being buried by the Digg Brigade:

• Burying Sony
  • undefined burried Sony slashes prices on Blu-ray player (Spam)
  • adm58 burried Sony slashes prices on Blu-ray player (Spam)
  • glenjammin burried PS3 price is right: Sony Australia - Or Sony Ripoff (Spam)

• Burying Microsoft
  • xoineg burried 3d Photo Viewer by Microsoft (Inaccurate)
  • phinnfort burried 3d Photo Viewer by Microsoft (Spam)
  • adm58 burried How to resize a partition in Windows Vista (Spam)

Not surprisingly once this story got submitted to Digg, not only did it get buried, but the user who submitted the story even had their account deleted by Digg.

The Digg Brigade have also been working hard to bury stories from the many domains (mainly blogs) like my own that recently have had the bans that were incorrectly applied to their sites ‘lifted’. I’ve been monitoring submissions from these sites and my own, and in almost all cases any submissions have been buried within an hour. For instance I can almost guarantee you that if this post gets submitted it will be buried within an hour.  Update: It was buried within 5 minutes!
In my view the only way submissions can get buried this quickly is if a group of users are looking out for posts from those sites. It’s surely only a matter of time before these sites get banned again thanks to efforts of the Digg Brigade.

I just can’t understand why Digg can’t just play fair. Fine, I understand the need to keep its promotion algorithm secret (although I don’t really see what more you can add on top of the basic concept of the more diggs you get, the greater the chances are of getting onto the homepage….). But, why do they continue to allow a small band of users to police the site? I’m all for allowing users to moderate posts, but only if the post is genuinely poor or inaccurate.

More: Pronet Advertising

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