Buried Story Shenanigans At Digg

Here’s more evidence that Digg is not the product of “collective intelligence” but rather a tightly controlled site run by a handful of people.

Yesterday, I wrote about LostCherry, a would-be MySpace killer. Someone posted the story to Digg, and it began rapidly garnering “diggs” and a slew of comments from enthusiastic LostCherry users.

Apparently, the Digg Nazis didn’t like this. The story was “buried.”


Here’s what one Digg Nazi said:

Ahhh….. digg has been invaded by lostcherry fan boys and girls.

Go away, digg is for tech, not slutty websites! Shoo!

Did the story violate Digg’s terms of service? Who knows, because there’s no information on Digg about “buried stories.”

As you can see from the screen shot above, a counter-slime story about LostCherry — with far fewer diggs — is still active on Digg.

There was an incident a few months ago involving ForeverGeek, at which time Digg’s Kevin Rose promised to clean up the act:

Missing stories: A common question we receive is the confusion surrounding missing stories. Once a story has received enough user reports it is automatically removed from the digg queue or homepage (depending on where the story is living at that time). The number of reports required varies depending on how many diggs the story has. This system is going to change in the near future.

If you look at the comments on the story, the ratio of Digg user objections to Digg user enthusiasm was pretty low.

So Kevin — what’s the deal here? Does majority rule, or is Digg still totalitarian?