Righteous Banning? I Think Not.

This is a guest post by Claudia - worth a read!

I joined Digg in March this year, tempted by the chance to promote my site through it. I didn’t wait to see how it worked and started submitting some articles, but soon felt that there was no space for such kind of things and quit submitting.

I dugg a lot instead, because you all know how it can be addictive. I found some interesting links to contents and some other less interesting. Some were frankly lame and useless.

Then I was explained what was under everyone’s eyes: Digg is a place where bunches of friends - so called friends - are all together digging and promoting this or that and giving their votes on a trade basis.

But Digg was really addictive to me as to many others, so I learned how to use scripts and I started using them for a month or so. Afterwards, the time Digg squeezed out of my day - and night - had become too much so I forcedly stopped and dugg here and there and only after reading the article.

I never had any clue of the blog post about the script use, they published it when I was on holiday. Yes I had the scripts, but I tried them only once after their post and then removed them immediately (btw I REALLY read the TOU by my subscription and either because I’m foreign or because it wasn’t clearly explained I heartily didn’t think to commit any crime).

If it is an egregious violation of the TOU I have to take it and forget. I got banned after another month though, but honestly, I saw so many good and committed Diggers banned and for lame reasons that I feel double guilt: one for having broken the rules (an Italian fighting back the prejudice); the other because a little thing like me, mostly inactive, has been associated to a major group of serious Social Media Users. Seriously.

However, I stopped digging before the ban, because I found the declared purpose of promoting good content was an excuse, before and after Digg’s upgrade. The only articles reaching the fp were and are from power diggers, no matter if they have good content or no content at all, the more they are voted and linked in their network, the more the submitters get popular and sort of rule the site. I decided I wasn’t interested in being active in a site where you need to search the net for something really worth reading, but being a small fish you have no chance that it will ever be noticed by more than a dozen people.

Is it fair for a social site to become a member popularity contest? Is it good that you have to literally live online to be riding the Digg-wave?

Still I hate having been banned, I hate their banning a lot of really nice and committed people, and I hate having lost a lot of friends, but I won’t take or support any action against Digg, besides this of course. I start feeling much relieved, sure that is a very good thing for me, because now I can turn around and see other less narrow minded sites and bump into new friends with whom to exchange opinions/ideas and not votes and finally share good contents without worrying about their rating.

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