Lately, Digg has become increasingly dominated by a select group of users whose high ranking and ridiculous number of diggs (over eighty in 2 minutes by a user called MrBabyMan) has made Digg a virtual oligarchy, ruled by the few and rich.

Digg has struck back, however, banning without warning some 80+ power users that were running scripts that violated Digg’s terms of service. A lot of these uses are pleading innocent, claiming they were blindsided by Digg and that they were partly responsible for the social news site’s success. But it’s hard to believe Digg would purposefully ban people that were making the site better. And the claims of the power users don’t pass the smell test.

The script that ended the lives of so many Diggers this week was developed by a user called DiggBoss, and it basically allowed users to see what stories of theirs were dugg by friends. However, the service increasingly became used to more easily identify and digg friends’ stories in a network of power users that artificially boosted each other up, thus getting those stories more homepage hits and a boost in traffic for the sites whose stories were dugg up.

Digg’s goal is, ostensibly, the remain more democratic. Any tools that let users more quickly and easily aid their friends is not democratic. It’s also hard to believe that the script users didn’t know it was against the terms of service. Also, with one Digg user charging $1200 to get a story on the Digg front page (and having success), it’s obvious there are nefarious things going on here that need to be changed.

But this move was the low hanging fruit… a lot of other power users were not banned and it’s not yet known why they weren’t or if they will be.

Story via Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 4:22 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.