My article Dealing With Stupid People Online made it to the front page of Digg.

And within 10 minutes it got buried.

Sources tell me that a story is most likely to get buried if it hovers on both the digg.com (technology) and digg.com/all front pages in the top 3 positions for several minutes. If it goes below the top 3 quickly enough, it stands a really good chance of hanging around for a few hours. Goes to show that human behavior, even of the democratic type, is quite predictable.

But what I'm really interested in is the anatomy of a "Digg bury" - what exactly happens.

For the longest time, I assumed that for a story to get buried meant that wit would effectively become invisible at Digg.

But this morning has proven that to be false. Immediately when the story hit the front page, I started monitoring it via pMetrics. When I noticed a slow down, I went over to Digg and discovered that the story had been buried (by stupid people, no less;-)

What surprised me was that traffic continued to flow from digg.com and digg.com/all

What can we make of this? Well, I'm not completely sure. I have three hypotheses.

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