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Digg - Filtering & Removing Stories for Profit Motives?

The “Overseers” at Digg (you know, the faithful employees – NOT the Digg commniuty) might have this story buried or removed in a short time as they might not like it. 

Make no mistake - Digg is a huge money-making machine.  No problems here, I’m all for the American Dream and capitalism.  It’s no secret – money making machines become very good at finding ways to make more money.  Anyone with a little knowledge of business understands this.  Most important to Digg is increasing profit, 2nd most important to Digg is maintaining the social community they’ve developed.  However, when a company uses deceit to advance profit – they’ve crossed the line.  Companies like that are no different than Enron, Halliburton and the rest.  The big question – does Digg use deceit?  Consider the following thoughts:
How many times have you submitted a story to Digg – watching it climb rapidly to 20, 30 or more diggs in under an hour – only to see it “magically disappear” from the list of upcoming stores?  According to Digg - those stores didn’t “resonate” well within the “Digg Community” and were buried.  Question, who belongs to the “Digg Community”?  Do Digg employees belong to the Digg Community?  Is it possible the “Digg Overseers” remove stories intentionally – for profit reasons?  Why don’t we see those slow climbing stories suddenly dissapear?  You know, those stories that aren’t fast climbers?
Why would Digg remove stories that would have otherwise been made popular?  I’m not saying they do but one possible reason is this.  Digg is all about traffic and generating revenue from that traffic.  Digg needs big traffic to continue generating revenue from those Google ads you see.  “The Overseers” at Digg know what stories generate the most traffic – Digg needs these types of stories to become popular.  “The Overseers” get to maintain a “good guy” image while insisting the “Digg Community” is responsible for buried stories.  However, Digg doesn’t go into too much detail about just who belongs to the “Digg Community”.

   
Why am I being critical of Digg?  Actually, I’m not really – I believe Digg is a great place to read interesting things.  But it would really bother me if I knew the “Digg Overseers” were removing stories for profit motives – while hiding behind the faithful “Digg Community”. 
E Lawrence Welch
Gun Rights Advocate


Digg!

3 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

  1. Digg is a mystery. But they have to protect their algorithm otherwise unscruplous persons, and we don’t have any shortage of them, will find loopholes and take advantage of that. I have launched a site for the little guy. Please check out from my url. I will post a snippets of this story.

    3. Deepak Dutta on September 17th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
  2. Obviously, I have no “proof” that they do this - however, it seems suspicous that rapidly climbing stories would suddenly dissappear. I know Digg uses a “top secret” algorithm to promote stories. However, it’s quite another thing to actually have “pre-approved” parameters on what stories will be “eligible” for the front page. (i.e. regardless of the number of diggs you get - you’re story will be deleted because it’s not going to appeal to the homepage viewers).

    4. Ed on September 17th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
  3. Well, what’s new? Personally I’ve never been really in favor of Digg since half of the content which makes the main page is the same stuff which has already been covered months earlier so it’s pretty much old news by the time someone decides to digg it or rewrite it and digg it for their own content.

    Not to mention giving yourself a little boost by asking all your friends do digg your latest entry, quality is far to find in digging for friends but still once the first bunch of diggs are there a lot tend to join in anyways.

    Front page material magically disappearing, just a new thing to add to the list but definitely doesn’t surprise me the slightest. Money could indeed be a valid reason for it being done, although there might also be more behind it, who knows.

    5. Slevi on September 17th, 2007 at 2:49 pm

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  2. links from TechnoratiMake no mistake - Digg is a huge money-making machine. No problems here, I’m all for the American Dream and capitalism….Original Story

  3. Kramer auto Pingback[…] Digg - Filtering & Removing Stories for Profit Motives? pyle_mountain - member blog: Financial Pizza created 2 hours, 16 minutes ago The “Overseers” at Digg (you know, the faithful employees – NOT the Digg commniuty) might have this story buried or removed in a short time as they might not like it.  Make no mistake - Digg is a huge money-making machine.  No problems here tags: digg maximize profits remove stories [edit] Comments: BZ: add comment ↓dump […]

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