Recently, Kevin Rose felt compelled to speak out and explain Digg’s stance behind blocked sites and the so-called “bury brigade” which has been the subject of much attention lately in the blogosphere. The blogosphere regularly and often unreasonably attacks Digg with inaccurate evidence and unfounded claims because of their failure to look at any “scandalous” situation from another perspective. So it’s time to cut through the spin and explain why Digg won’t make buries transparent.
I was the first advocate for the transparency of buries back when Digg first implemented the bury button, because of my philosophy that if you are to disclose who is digging stories, then you must disclose who is burying stories. My reasoning being that one bury report was clearly carrying more weight in the promotion algorithm than one digg was. I realized that buries by users not only carried the convenience of anonymity but furthermore the veil of secrecy, which made the feature a haven for irresponsible and abusive actions by community members. Because of the secrecy behind buries, the community lacked the ability to monitor and expose bury abuse, like they can with digging abuse. However, it wasn’t long before I realized that making buries transparent will do more harm than good as Digg crosses the chasm into mainstream culture.
Transparency is a term that is to quickly tossed around by many, as the end all solution for everything in social networking, without actually looking at the ramifications it may have on each particular issue. I’ve long known the reason Digg does not make buries transparent is because it further exposes the logic behind their promotion algorithm. Further understanding, by the community, of their promotion algorithm will inevitably lead to greater manipulation of their system, and makes it even more difficult for them to prevent such malicious gaming attempts that they find themselves battling on a daily basis.
Kevin’s words reinforce my contention:
For the same reason that we don’t expose all of our back-end methodologies for the Digg promotional algorithm, we also don’t expose the details of how the burying algorithm works. We spend a lot of time analyzing our data and understanding how people Digg and bury content. We have spent the last 2.5 yrs building systems that ensure a diverse group of users promote or bury stories.
Ultimately, the greater transparency Digg permits for their promotion algorithm, the easier it will be for Digg gamers to develop stronger methods of promoting content to Digg’s front page illegitimately without detection.
Originally posted on March 5, 2007 @ 1:40 am
While there is no transparency of buries the bury brigade will have free reign to destroy the good work that Digg have built.
Mention SEO or post a blog URL and you get marked down as spam. At the very least they should implement a rule that you have to have viewed the article before burying it.
Personally I see this issue is in danger of reaching point. Already there are many stories appearing accusing Digg of bias and prejudice.
Are their precious algorithms work all this bad publicity?
Keeping Buries transparent only makes sense if a bury has same weight as the digg, as on Reddit you can Up and Down equally.
Digg isn’t about transparency and I don’t think it ever will be.
True, digg needs to keep some details close to its chest. However, to not provide any info is a big mistake. Kevin’s post doesn’t provide any information that disproves the existance of the Bury brigade or gives any indication that Digg is going to respond positively to the criticism it is receiving.
I can understand the point but its always easy to hide the implementation.Moreover If they bury they don’t give a proper reason.They would bury the controversies against them to.Diggers should have enough strength to come out with non vulgar comment to fight back why they did instead of making stupid comments I have seen many a time..
They should give proper reason to bury any story at least they can do that.
Moreover why do they mark posts coming from blogs with “/blog” at the end.Thats no less than racism
My apology if i hurt someone on that but thats some of the question that should be justified.
I just think that Digg should do something to watch for users who are burying too quickly. For example, I shouldn’t be able to bury 100 stories in a row without some kind of warnings saying “hey, slow down there” like they do when adding friends.
I do agree that digg does require a greater degree of regulating buries. Surely they need a system in place that could prevent bury abuse.
I remember watching digg spy almost a year ago, to see someone irresponsibly burying literally 45+ submissions of mine, in a row.
The problem comes about whenever you make a feature quicker and easier to use on a site. With digg’s old comment system, only the truly offensive and spam like comments where buried b/c you had to go through a drop down menu rating system. Now it’s a one click up or down vote in the comments, which leads people to use it to bury legitimate comments just b/c they don’t agree with the person.
I think a regulation of how quickly a person can bury stories is a great way to prevent a lot of the abuse, and another way would be for people to have to submit a easy and quick explanation of why the buried the story…as some sites use for spam reporting.
Lately actual buries by users don’t seem to matter much. Stories disappear from all the lists seemingly unrelated to the topic, relevance, and the actual number of times it has been buried.