First of all, let me say that I am not an active Digger anymore. I gave up on Digg some 3 months back, when I found that the amount of time required and the network required to get some occasional FP was too much for me.

Zaibatsu banned!

Zaibatsu is the latest top Digger to be banned. Funnily enough, he was not banned for the normal crime these days – using scripts to automatically digg, shout, manage friends etc. He was banned because he submitted a pic of someone he thought was a beautiful female Digger, and the owner of the site redirected the URL to another page where products were being sold.

Not his fault at all, as we can see. But Digg went ahead and banned him. He was a good contributor to Digg from the beginning. There is a chance that he would get his account back, I think. Losing him is bad PR.

Fools banned for using scripts

I have no sympathy for the people who were banned by Digg because they were using scripts. Scripts were against TOS. End of story. If you wanted to be safe, you would not use them – not even the simple Greasemonkey scripts for digging your friends’ submissions directly from the Friends’ Submissions page. That is as non-spammy as it gets. I had with 3 months back, and when the first rumors of scripts being trouble surfaced, I deleted it. Seems a lot of others did not. Even much more dangerous scripts.

For example, there are active Diggers who I have added on my IM. Top guys. When I digg their stories regularly, they add me back. Don’t Digg them, and they vanish from my IM list. Digg a few, and they are back. Don’t digg, and they vanish. Script? I think so.

Then there are the ones who unfriend me, friend me again, unfriend me again – sure sign of a script.

Basic screw-up with Digg

I am all for submitting good stories – but when a good story gets 50 diggs and it cannot reach the front page later all on its own, you are asking me to spend much more than a reasonable time on Digg digging my friends, networking, checking shouts…

Who really can afford to spend the time needed to play by the rules and become a succesful Digger?

A professional Digger is who.

For an active student, or someone in a well-paying corporate job, Digg is impossible to succeed in. Why? If you are an employee or employer, you spend close to 9 hours working and commuting, sometimes more. Then in a weekday, you have perhaps 4-5 hours of time available. How many can afford to keep 2 or 3 hours of that time for Digg? Especially if you have a girlfriend / wife / kids?

Impossible.

An honest Digg user would reach home, log into Digg, digg the stories he like on the front page, read most of them, digg upcoming stories, read the good ones, check for shouts and digg the ones you like, check friends submissions and digg the ones you like and then look in the big sites for some good story to submit. Then spend a few minutes letting a few friends know about his new submission.

That is easily 3-4 hours. Tough for someone who has a life. Easy for a professional digger who can do this all day.

Er… unless, you have some scripts to help you with all that!

The good Digger I mentioned above will get probably 50 diggs on his stories over a period of time. He will get nowhere near the front page without 150 or more. Often more.

End of story, Digg. You are a professional’s playground, and the only thing that matters is how well nd how long they fool ya.

Digg Front Page – Just what is it?

Now, we know Diggers don’t like blogs. With full justification, of course. Nowadays, if you look at the Digg front page, you see nothing but big media stories. New York Times, CNN etc, or the top blogs on the Net. Gizmodo, autoblog, engadget, arstechnica…

Now there are a lot of blogs which fall a rung below those ones. Sometimes with better articles, better scoops, better pics or better insights.

Digg’s, and Diggers’ negativity towards upcoming quality blogs and small sites mean that the front page of Digg resembles Google News – from 6 hours past, often 24 hours past.

More productive to just go to Google or Yahoo News, right? Or just go to Huffingtonpost, or Autoblog, or NY Times directly.

Coming back to Zaibatsu, bad deal, man. But they will probably give it back to you. And you will go back to the good work, and all will be normal with Digg. Normal is pretty bad, though.

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