As if hitting the front page of Digg wasn’t hard enough before, now we have to worry about being handpicked as one of the URL’s that have been stamped with “Do Not Front Page“.
They’re not banned domains. They can be submitted. They can be upvoted as many times that’s humanly (or robotically) possible but they will never receive the infamy of being promoted to the front page. There is no threshold or time limit on these URL’s. It’s too late for these sites.
Unlike banned domains, the sites on the autobury list are not prohibited from being submitted. They go through like normal and appear to be on the way to the front page. At some point they just drop out of the upcoming list and are forever left in obscurity. What has happened is that the infamous algorithm has marked these URL’s as offenders who have attempted to game the system.
Am I On The List?
Finding out if a site is autoburied isn’t tough. Most of them have consistently had their posts submitted to Digg by the same user or a small group of users. Big blogs (ie TechCrunch or XKCD) may have an even larger percentage of posts submitted than sites on the autobury list however not by any manipulation as there is clear diversity in who is submitting and voting. [1]
Unfortunately the algorithm does not only look at submitters. Before a submission is promoted it must reach a certain number of votes within a 24 hour period. If every time User A submits a story, Users B-Z are the first to vote, the alarms are going to sound. It’s likely that when this happens, User A has jumped on his instant message or microblogging client of choice and spammed his buddy list with the link to his submission or the direct like to the blog (which sequentially has a button to vote on the story embedded within the page).
Ok I’m On It, Now What?
Once the alarms have sounded, users are put on a list of delinquents. As repeat offenders are sought out by the algorithm they are eventually manually investigated by staff. Since there is no public evidence of system gaming (it has all occurred on IM) the staff member is forced to do one of three things (or perhaps all) nstead of just banning the user, banning the IP and blocking the URL.
First thing that could happen is that users could lose their voting privilege but not their voting right! They can still vote on submissions and the numbers will in fact increase however that vote will have no effect on meeting the threshold to promotion.
Secondly the users will be shut out of ever hitting the front page again. No matter how many votes their submissions reach they will either drop out of queue or sit around until the 24 hour death.
Thirdly the URL will be placed on the autobury list, which blocks it from being promoted and in turn preventing it from having a chance of receiving somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 authentic page views.
An example of a site on the autobury list is Photopreneur. At some point six months ago this blog was stamped with “Do Not Front Page“. The reasons could have been a lack of diversity of submitting users r because a familiar group of early voters triggered this end result. Out of respect for the users involved I will not investigate any further yet patterns can be found that indicated system gaming. If you look deep into the blog itself you will see no difference of quality in the content. It is still the same bloggers blogging about the same topics. There is no reason why this blog could not have continued its front page success. There must have been system gaming and in turn autoburying. [2]
What This All Means!
We all know that there is a certain set of guidelines when it comes to democracy. Digg’s Terms of Use addresses artificially inflating the vote, however, the lack of admission regarding any autobury list says that there are holes in how the system works and thus devalues its claim to be the democratic social news aggregator.
What remains to be seen is how the crowd’s collective algorithm will compensate for this.
Great article.
Our domain was banned some time ago, but since your average digg user (or average bear for Paddington fans) isn’t out target audience, that was not a big deal, but it did help us do what you did, which was lift the tablecloth and see the crumbs under Digg’s surface.
I actually think being banned helped us, in a curious way, improve our digg analytics and automation software because we had to look beyond their effect on our traffic and focus on creating time savings.
There’s a forest gump comment in there somewhere.
-OT