Where Is Digg Support?
A friend of mine, Dave Altavilla, happens to operate a website that is dedicated to hardware. Since the articles on his site are all original content and very well researched, he has enjoyed a fairly regular success rate on digg submissions. I’ve even posted many of his articles and enjoyed success with them as well. That was, until recently. About two or three months ago, a disturbing trend came to light. Stories from the site were being buried and buried relatively fast.
Being a top digger once, the pattern of buries did not apper to be organic, but rather looked like a coordinated effort. Both Dan and I followed this activity over a period of time and could only come to the conclusion that a group of individuals, likely associated with a competing site were responsible for the buries. It is relatively easy to craft an RSS feed from the digg search page to be informed of when an article from a particular site has been submitted. This allows anyone to monitor a source and bury (or digg) stories as they are submitted.
Dave wrote a very professional email to digg support asking for them to investigate this behavior. The following is that email.
From: David Altavilla
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 6:07 PM
To: ‘digg support’
Subject: Malicious Burying Issue On Digg
Importance: HighHello Digg Support,
I am writing to seek your assistance with an issue I am experiencing with my submissions on Digg.com. Over the past few weeks, all of the stories I, my staff or friends, have submitted have been buried, literally within minutes (sometimes hours) of completing them. I know the Digg community decides what stories are and are not deemed Digg-worthy, but I think someone (or a group of people operating on someone’s behalf) may be intentionally seeking out and maliciously burying my submissions to your site.Â
My main concern is that I am in the process of integrating social book-marking functionality that specifically refers people to Digg.com in our new site engine that will be powering HotHardware.com in the near future. I fear the investment I’ve made in this functionality may be in jeopardy because someone is burying our stories, regardless of the quality of the content. In the past, roughly 80% of my, or members of my team’s, submissions were deemed Digg-worthy and promoted on your site. But now, the stories never get a chance to be seen by the community because of what I believe is potentially malicious burying. Here are some recent examples:
http://digg.com/hardware/Head_To_Head_Intel_VIIV_vs_AMD_LIVE
http://digg.com/hardware/AMD_s_690G_V_Series_Chipset_Integrated_ATI_Graphics_w_HDMI_Launched
http://digg.com/hardware/The_Ultimate_nForce_590_SLI_Motherboard_The_Asus_CrossHair
http://digg.com/hardware/HDMI_on_Tap_Asus_EAX1600PRO_I_256M_A_EN7600GT_HDTI_256M_A
I am hoping this is something you could look into. I am not trying to find out who is doing this, or why. But if you look into this issue and find that the SAME users are doing the burying, you’ll know we, and the Digg community, are being shortchanged. I just want to get a fair shake and give the Digg community the chance to see what I believe is great content. If someone is maliciously burying the stories, we both lose. The Digg community misses out, and so do the editors who dedicate their time to writing the stories.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to your response.
Regards,
David Altavilla
Editor In Chief
HotHardware.com
It has now been over a week and he has not heard a peep from digg, and I doubt he will. While Dave’s concerns center more on the burying tactics, mine concerns are more geared to the complete disregard digg has for its users. The least digg could do is send out their normal form letter to acknowledge the concern. By not responding to its userbase, digg is shooting itself in the foot.
I only write this post to rattle the cage a little in the slim hope that digg will wake up and engage their users.
Until next time-
3MonkeysÂ
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