further degraded the value of the friend’s vote on a user’s friend list, which remind me of their vision of creating a friend system that is based on a user interests….

Don’t click your own ads, don’t do anyting illegal, don’t put your power on adsense companies, etc…

Either way, I’m glad we’re both back in.

The DiggNation has been brought to their senses and realizes the bad rep they were getting (over payola to Digg stories, banning, etc.) might’ve hurt their buyout chances.

I had to rewrite my story a bit, but several, if not most of the points I wanted to make are still valid, even with the lift of bans.

See the story here:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=4446

Cheers!

The folks over at Digg are a great bunch, but they will never be able to prevent abuse. Someone will always find a way around things.

There are entirely too many lame bastards on digg who spend all their time paraphrasing press releases and only submit stories to their own lame sites and don’t digg or comment on other people’s stories. If more users would join this alleged “bury brigade” and take two seconds to see if a story is actually original to that site or the submitter is a spammer then the quality of digg would improve dramatically.

Anyone taking bets ?

Liberta-Togo.com

usually consisted of a suspiciously high number of stories making it to the home page.

As one of the sites that have been granted a ‘reprieve’ I’d just like to point out that the reason we were getting banned was usually because Digg used to just add up the number of buries a domain got and once it hit that number the domain was buried, not because Digg was getting gamed by us.

The buries were accumulated usually because:

(i) because our readers were submitting too many of our posts, which were in many cases rightly getting buried as they weren’t worthy of the homepage
(ii) Digg (in the past) didn’t have adequate duplicate url protection so articles were being submitted repeatedly by users e.g I had one post that hit the homepage 3 times in two months
(iii) There was a group of digg users who were deliberately getting blogs banned

On Monday I did an analysis which found 183 sites in the Alexa top 10,000 that were banned by Digg. (the story hit the Digg homepage and was subsequently buried).

I just reran the 183 banned domains, and it looks like all but 6 of them were unbanned. I won’t paste the full 177 unbanned domains here, but you can find all 183 domains here:
http://www.naffziger.net/blog/.....d-by-digg/

and the 6 still banned domains here:
http://www.naffziger.net/blog/.....e-domains/

Based on Digg’s ban messages, there are three types of bans. It looks like all of the ‘permanent ban’ sites have been unbanned, while the ‘temporary ban’ sites remain banned for now.