The only sure way to develop problems with a website or internet service is quite simple; grow. Since social news/link website digg.com hit the internet in 2004 it has expanded at an almost unbelievable rate, providing traffic more than capable of sustaining the necessary personnel to continue the websites growth as well as $2.8 million dollars in venture capital. Digg has become exactly what it wanted to be; a hub of exciting technology and internet news. Diggs large team of developers, technicians and engineers have been able to handle most of the growing pains serious enough to warrant their involvement, but the more interesting thing to note is how digg users themselves have shown their capacity to solve problems. This is no coincidence or Christmas miracle however it was all quite planned. The focus of the advances to the site have been primarily based on one of two things.
- Give users the power to vote for more actions or
- Give users more information to go on. As it turns out, this is working.
One of the more prominent problems facing digg now is the inception of would-be spammers influence of top diggers. Stories emerged several months ago that indicated extra power submissions which come from long time users with a large amount of "friends" (users that have added the powerful submitter to see his stories earlier next time he or she adds a link to the site) and long histories of frontpaged submissions. Any qualified internet marketing firm or startup site knows just what digg.com does. A large number of them must even know of the power submitters it 'employs'. Since digg submitters are not compensated by digg in anyway besides peer respect and statistics, the wealth or poverty of any given digg user is seemingly random. With diggs popularity, marketing wizards have begun to contact powerful submitters with offers of monetary compensation in exchange for the simple submission of a link to their site with a positive spin.
Although the entire concept of digg is freedom of submission, voting, etc. accepting one of these offers is against their TOS. Recently, top user supernova17 was temporarily banned after the discovery that he made such an arrangement. Since he took steps to appologize and rectify the situation he was allowed access to his account again. What digg.com, supernova17 and perhaps even users themselves did not count on was the backlash of scornful, snippy, angry young users who's trust is often not easily earned, but very easily lost.
It's to soon to tell if supernova17 will still find benefit from his long standing account or if it would be better left abandoned, but it's clear that digg users are not immediately allowing him to simply forget his actions. Stories he submits are labeled as spam by users, and his comments are "trolled" (trolling is a tactic of following users actions through forums or websites and causing them grief)
The reasons for this seem fairly clear. Within digg is an atmosphere of assistance to the website itself. "User" is almost an inappropriate word, because those that go past simply reading submissions are actually powering the entire site. Users tend to align themselves with the goals of digg itself and stick to it's principles (providing interesting links to various technology stories and websites every day of the year.) They don't want to read spam anymore than digg officials want it on their site.
Although the full effect of this "black listing" is not yet known, it's clear that is affecting things simply by the fact that people are talking about it. It's easy for an individual to mark a story as spam, and after enough users agree the story is removed. If just 10 users decide to "bury" the story in this way because they remember supernova17s mishandling, it has effectively changed the way content from that user was handled. Only time will tell if the gigantic average that is digg.com will effectively ban users who get caught submitting spam.
