Yep, 4016. That's how many Diggs a single article on my webzine, Rational Outrage, got not long before Digg decided that the domain was spam and banned us.
My webmaster inquired right away. After all, our site is entirely non-commercial--we're not selling anything, and there's no advertising at all on the site. And to the best of our knowledge, about a dozen of our posts have been submitted to Digg since Rational Outrage launched on March 17. That didn't seem excessive.
The response from Digg stated: As you know, Digg is a community-driven website – our community has consistently reported the domain to which you refer as spam.
Uh huh.
"Consistently", while they were upvoting our school bus rape story 4016 times: http://digg.com/world_news/7_Year_Old_Raped_On_School_Bus_School_Court_Don_t_Care Apparently those 40,000+ Digg visitors who crashed our server and left dozens of comments were just doing spam research.
So then, if that doesn't count for anything, surely the little ones won't, either:
Not the police taser abuse story with 225 Diggs.
Not the maverick composter article with 125 Diggs.
In fact, five of the twelve stories submitted to Digg received more than 100 Diggs. Surprising "the community" could find time to "consistently report" this domain as spam, what with all that upvoting going on.
The cut and paste from Digg also suggested: While we welcome users to submit their own content, overdoing it often incites the users to mark the user as a spammer, the site as a spam site, and otherwise decent content as blogspam.
12 stories. Six months. Submitted by six different people, three of whom have no connection to the site.
I've always pointed out that sites like Digg are private companies and free to make whatever decisions they like within the bounds of the law. If they want to ban us because they don't like our politics or our color scheme, they're perfectly free to do so. But guys...you don't gotta LIE.
UPDATE: On Wednesday evening, August 27, we received a brief email from Digg apologizing for the "confusion" and saying that we should be clear to submit pages from Rational Outrage again. We did not receive any explanation, either from Digg or in response to my requests in the Digg comments for one of the people who had been "consistently reporting us as spam" to explain on the forum or via email. However, we do seem to have been unbanned.
4 comments:
This kind of thing makes me crazy.
I had problems with someone hacking into my account, and not only was PayPal not helpful, but they wouldn't even open any of the emails I sent, because they said I couldn't appeal. I still have no way of getting a hold of anyone at PayPal.
If a company is going to offer a service to the public, they should follow through if their customers have problems.
I hope you find out what happened. It could help others.
I also hope you will figure out the problem. It could be that Digg was doing some cleaning and mistakenly banned your site.
Gayane, I would like to believe that it was a mistake, but Digg did respond with the one line that "the community has consistently reported the domain to which you refer as spam". While I have a hard time believing that to be true, Digg is at least claiming to have checked up and confirmed that there's a problem with the domain. But no one--Digg officials, Digg users, or our visitors--has been able to identify that problem for us.
This is an outrageous tale, well beyond the mere "Go figure" category. My own feeling recently, is that some social bookmarking sites, Digg included, are undergoing a devolution. This story confirms that feeling.
Bobbie
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