Are You On The Digg Super Secret Autobury Blacklist?

Paula Mooney has put together another great piece this week that investigates the little known but often speculated on super secret internal autobury feature that’s been imposed by Digg. Digg is the social content website that is a favorite among bloggers. Having one of your stories make it to the frontpage of Digg could mean tens of thousands of visitors over a short amount of time and in some cases that could literally launch a blog into major action.

However, as with any service that provides either money or traffic it will be manipulated. What defines manipulation is a discussion that will never have an equalizing answer outside of the internal organization. On their site Digg makes this statement about itself.

Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on Digg is submitted by our community (that would be you). After you submit content, other people read your submission and Digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of visitors to see.

The founder and chief architect Kevin Rose is known for his continued mantra that Digg is driven by the users but the recent HD-DVD Hack Key fiasco proved that wasn’t the case. Now Paula along with a few others has uncovered plausible evidence that the Digg algorithms autobury content submitted by both flagged domains and flagged user accounts. She also posts some credible sources and evidence to back up the theory. I won’t regurgitate her findings, I’ll let those speak for themselves and you can check them out here, but I’ll offer this thought on the whole Digg discussion.

Something I didn’t see posted that I’ve thought for a long time is the Digg algorithms have the ability to learn the patterns of it’s users. By analyzing the urls that users submit then crawling those they are somehow able to piece together domains that are used by a common account. (ie: all the self submitters). Since this practice is heavily frowned upon but practiced by virtually everyone, it wouldn’t be too difficult for some math geniuses to piece the data together to form a pattern with common attribute. Now, my theory is purely speculation and I’ve not done nor do I intend to do the research that Paula has put into her post in an attempt to prove it or disprove it. I think anyone that uses Digg understands what’s happening and the backlash for a couple of weeks ago was only the beginning of the end for the service.

If you agree with this then Digg this post, then head over to Paula’s site and read her post, she’ll show you how to check to see if your on the super secret autobury blacklist. Once your done, make sure you Digg her post too. Thanks for reading.