An email I sent to Digg concerning their policies

By ryancaldwellNetworking

After finding that one of my sites was flagged at Digg for “consistently” being a news middleman (despite not being a news site, nor ever submitting news content to Digg), I sent the following email which I feel makes an important point. If I receive a response, I’ll post it here.

I say this with genuine intent on making Digg a better place:

I’d recommend taking a long, hard look at the definition of “consistently” that you (or the algorithms) employ when making a consequential decision like this. In my experience, consistency implies a pattern across time. But I have strong empirical evidence that you are making high-consequence judgements based on single or small sample sizes.

It is in the best interest of Digg long term to have a more agile and intelligent means of determining what constitutes “consistent”

The point of the email? Well, to be blunt, it’s this:

It’s only in a police state-like environment that “consistent” comes to mean “at least once.”

6 thoughts on “An email I sent to Digg concerning their policies”

  2. Welcome to Digg, the re-creation of the high school lunch room.

    About half of the top SEO blogs have been banned from Digg for “spam.” Take a look at Promote-my-site.com and decide if it’s spam or doesn’t have original material.

    And yet every article from Men’s Health is submitted and voted up, complete with pop-up ads.

    If your entire strategy relies upon Digg or a single site, you need to rethink your strategy.

  3. It’s seeming more and more evident that if someone annoys you….. blog about it. Hopefully after some bad press Digg will reverse it’s stupid decision.

  4. Brett,
    Yeah, I always say that the only purpose of Digg is as a distribution vehicle to Mainstream Media. Ultimately, if you can reach journalists in mainstream media, Digg becomes irrelevant and you can still drive loads of traffic (traffic that is actually quite monetizable).

    At the end of the day, the best suggestion I can make here is to diversify your distribution points. Digg and Reddit have helped me identify a number of high-traffic distribution points, and for that I’m thankful. But it also feels good not to have to rely 100% on the whims of a social media site and it’s misguided policies.

    Actually, come to think of it, I have several sites that now get more traffic from 1) direct and 2) high profile distribution points than from Google. So diversifying traffic sources is the fundamental step towards becoming a defensible online business.

  5. Hey Ryan

    I have derived far less success from Digg in general. The sites I work with just do not fit well within the Digg network, so something like this if it were to come my way would have so little impact that I wouldn’t notice.

    That said, you work with several sites that are key to Digg’s demographics and I can understand how a shallow decision on their part could trigger business repercussions that are undesirable.

    I know that you do not put all your eggs in one basket, but I think your experience illustrates the point that Digg’s days of usefulness are waning. I suspect that Digg will never die, like Slashdot before it, which I find completely worthless and devoid of utility. Slashdot is still the shizbit for some folks, and I’m sure there will be die hards that never give up on digg either.

    But if I were to guess, (and that’s what it would be) I’d guess that Digg’s growth is going to fade away and so that points to a need to find the right path to growth and audience through other vehicles outside of Digg.

    I have to say that one side of me hopes that Digg will actually keep on at its current level of success. If it does, then it will hopefully hold all those sniping groupies of negativity within the Digg Social Network like flies stuck to paper and that might keep them out of the more positive ethos of new networks.

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