Who Diggs and Who Buries on Digg?

Today virtually everyone (at least in the blogosphere) has heard of Digg.com, which is considered to be a powerful social networking website that can attract huge amount of traffic if stories get to the front page. Unfortunately for many (and by many I mean the majority of Digg users), including myself, who have desperately tried to promote stories on Digg, it all ends up with submissions always getting buried without any chance of making it to the site\'s front page. Due to such a \"bad luck\", a number of rumors around the unfair Digg administration appeared over the Internet. It starts to smell fishy when you notice a myriad of great stories getting buried, despite receiving quite enough diggs to appear on the front page. But there\'s more questionable stuff regarding the social network. For example, I have noticed that a lot of submissions have been buried so fast that it makes me and other users I found over the Internet wonder whether the stories are being buried by other Digg users or the whole process is automatic.



I have made a few researches on the web and found users that submitted several original stories (unique content) on Digg and all of them were \"auto buried\" in a rather short period of time. One of the users wrote that he submitted 21 stories from his website. All of the stories were submitted by different users and all of them were written on a wide range of topics. In the end each story got buried. I can understand when a story doesn\'t get enough diggs to get to the front page, but what is really odd is when all stories are buried without any explanation. I must say that the chance that over 20 stories on different topics submitted by different users get buried is extremely small.



There was a time when I submitted on Digg.com stories from original sources and what a surprise it was when I noticed that the original stories got buried or didn\'t make it to the front page, while those that copied the content received numerous diggs. Here\'s how I see the whole picture: a user copies a story from the original source (when notices it on Digg and finds it interesting), then publishes the story on his/her blog and afterwards submits it to Digg and gets hundreds of up votes while the original source whether gets buried instantly or after managing to obtain about 20 diggs or so. This reminds me about the Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest that took place in 1930s. Charlie Chaplin himself decided to take part in the competition. The result? He didn\'t even manage to get to the finals. Digg, just like all social networks, is supposed to promote free speech and help users share the information they believe is worth sharing, but it seems that Digg is the one that provides what it considers to be relevant for the site, thus it clearly makes a point that the average user is not the most important figure on the site that is supposed to include user generated content. I\'ve recently watched a video about a youtube clip entitled \"Viacom vs You\" that was buried by Digg despite the fact that it was dugg by over a thousand people (here\'s the link to the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaD8lV-jc5I&feature=player_embedded).



It is still a mystery why so many users still try their luck on Digg when there are other, more democratic, sources, like, say, Reddit, where users have much more chances of making their story popular. It was also frustrating to discover really weird submissions on the Digg\'s front page, and by weird I mean those that should have never had the chance to be noticed, for instance some weird images with bizarre comments like this one http://digg.com/people/Amazing_Armless_Strong_Woman_Barbie_Guerra.



A lot of users (including myself) thought that the key to success on Digg is a catchy title and an intriguing description. But soon it turned out that such strategy simply doesn\'t work. There are rumors that Digg features an internal \"filter list\" that automatically buries the submissions shortly before they get popular. Those who emailed Digg got the same response for each buried story, something like \"the digg community found this story to not be worthy\". A lot of stories that are found on the site\'s front page are often from the same sources. I noticed that very often these submissions are from such websites as Arstechnica, Telegraph and BBC. Is there a chance that Digg supports websites it wants to support? The democracy around Digg seems to fade away, but still a lot of people use it and it remains one of the most popular social networks over the Internet. Some users blame Digg for suppressing stories that it doesn\'t like, especially those that illustrate the website in a negative way. So why people are still using Digg? Is there a chance that Digg will explain the questions regarding the buried stories (and I don\'t mean spam, porn or other submissions that violate the Digg\'s Terms of Use)? And if there\'s a mechanism for picking the \"right\" stories for the front page and what are the principles for selecting a submission?