Why mass-burials ain’t against Digg’s TOS

Posted by multippt

While Digg’s terms of use/service certainly is lengthy and covers almost all aspects of digging, they didn’t mention much about “burying”. It’s against Digg’s TOS to band up together and Digg articles. It’s against the TOS to “spam” Digg. Burying? You can bury articles all you like without Digg saying anything, or for that matter band up to form a “brigade” to bury articles.

The Bury frenzy

What’s better than voting against articles? Burying them. A bury not only constitutes the same weight as 3-5 negative Diggs (technically it doesn’t do that, but it decreases the Digg velocity such that the effect is similar to several negative diggs), but it adds a probability of the article in question to never come to the front again. As an added “bonus”, Digg will prevent sites hit by a certain number of buries from being submitted.

While the original intent of burying is aimed for moderation, it seems that users have decided to make use of burying as an opportunity to eradicate those that they like. Fancy knowing why “make-money” articles never made it to the front page? Burying does that. Well, that’s despite Digg being a general site that isn’t constrained to any topic.

What are some things that people bury? There are mainly:
1. Multiple articles coming from the same place over a period of 10 days, particularly those that are not well-known
2. Articles submitted by the same person owning the sites involved
3. Articles talking about certain “taboo” subjects on Digg

Why isn’t Digg doing anything about burying 

The terms of use/service says nothing

Digg doesn’t say anything about bury manipulation. As burying articles is technically not manipulating the “Digg count” (i.e. Digg count remains largely the same) neither a “service” provided by Digg, Digg didn’t bother restricting burying because it is not really explicitly breaking the TOS.

Burying is a (perfect) moderation tool

Killing burying is a bad move, so that’s why Digg will never remove burying. In fact, implementing burying is one of the greatest moves Digg made: Most of the buried articles are actually really spam, and none of Digg’s spam made it to the front page for more than 10 minutes. Pretty neat filtering right?

In addition, having users to moderate content is much efficient than having small groups of staff filtering out content (like they do in SlashDot). Given that Digg receives billions of submissions, it’s impossible to moderate that much without the help of… the submitters themselves.

It’s not wrong to bury something you don’t like

Burying is often a tool used to bury spam and stuff like that. Because spam has such a wide meaning, different people perceive spam as different things. Some classify bulk messages as spam, while others classify things they don’t like as spam. Because there is no harm involved in marking anything as spam, users don’t mind burying stuff.

A bury brigade? What brigade?

While Digg does not take too kindly to Digg brigades, Digg doesn’t do much about the converse. Rather, because of the open nature of burying, Digg will not bother tracking user buries. Thus, mass-buryings against particular topics are “untraceable” for public eyes. Besides, no one has solid proof that bury brigades exist, because there is no means to view such information as of yet (Digg records it, but do they look at it?).

The implications

What are the symptoms of Digg not restricting burying? Users are now making use of Digg’s bury feature.  Sadly, burying is like giving a lot of moderation abilities to the ordinary person - so much so that even small groups of active users can choose to ban certain topics from appearing to the masses. Fancy an article that praises Microsoft to appear on the front page of Digg? Almost never.

Burying also bans information that is otherwise useful and insightful to most people. So, why do people bury stuff like that? Competition of course! Because burying is in many ways more powerful than digging itself, some users may actively submit rival articles only to get them buried afterwards. (Remember the side-effects of burying?)

Of course, mass burial is a widely unpopular action, and hence is highly discouraged. After all, no one wants their articles to be buried.