No, Really, What's Up With Digg Thug Posses?

By Li Evans

Alright, I think I might get a little controversial (especially by what I suggest at the end of this post), but gosh darnit, what is it with those folks over at Digg?  I wonder what Kevin Rose is really thinking letting the notoriously tweenage nerd population decide who is a spammer and who isn't?

First we hear about John Chow getting banned, now Lee Odden?  LEE?  No really, you read that right, Lee Odden's Top Rank blog has been banned over at Digg.  What is wrong with these people at Digg!?  Chris Winfield has compiled a whole list of sites banned from Digg - it's amazing to see who's been put on this "Digg Hit List".  Yes, even Seth Godin's Squidoo site and the ENTIRE Digital Point Forums site is on there.

How can this happen?  It isn't like Lee has gone out and submitted his own stories to Digg.  If that was the case, then I could see that the community as a whole would get pissed off and tag him and TopRank as a Digg Spammers.  But come on, Lee has a lot better things to do than sit and submit his stories to Digg all day.

What's sad is that one "Digger" with a beef about a site can get a reputable, newsworthy site or blog banned from Digg.  One person with a grudge can email all their other members of their "Digg Thug Posse" and instruct them to email Digg Support and claim a site consistently is submitting spam - and that's the death knell for the site on Digg.  WOW!

No investigation, no contacting the site owner, no editorial control - you just get banned, FOREVER.  How screwed up is that?  The site owner isn't even notified, the site owner has no clue its happened, the site owner - has no control.

What would happen if me and my "Digg Thug Posse"  (I think I might have a whole 3 people in my list of friends) emailed Digg to say MSNBC or heck CNN were Digg Spammers?  (Maybe Neil could answer that for us?)  No really, I am really wondering this now.  Could we as a community of bloggers and marketing experts get MSNBC or CNN banned from submissions on Digg - if its that easy to get a site banned?  I am *seriously posing this question to the community - "Could we as a community blatantly act as a whole to expose this nasty loop hole in Digg?"

*and yes that means I'm open to experimenting with this idea

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