Is Digg Evil or Just Incompetent?

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Back in the wild west days of last summer when scripting was the in thing at Digg, my company released a couple of free Greasemonkey scripts that helped people with their Digging activities. A lot of people, including some famous ones, used it. We used these to funnel people into the paid versions of software on our site. Life was good.

Then the Great Digg Purge of 2008 came down and literally 1,000s of people were banned for using scripts. Google [banned by Digg] and you'll see a lot of people complaining about it. Needless to say, it put a bit of a dent in our business model. We've recovered, but it was a tough few months. The story is at Digg is on a Banning Rampage if you're interested.

Also needless to say, my account http://digg.com/users/ltdraper got banned along with the 1,000s. Click that link and you'll see the famous oops screen. That account used to have some really powerful friends.

Now for the interesting part. About a month ago I started getting emails like this on the email address that was connected to that account:

#main internet marketing discussion forum #digg #evil #incompetent
  • That would be pretty slick on their part...

    Do you just have any old accounts you've forgotten about?
    • [1] reply
    • No, you can't sign up for a new account with an email address from another account -- especially one that has been banned. They enforce 1 account = 1 email address.
  • That looks plain silly thing to do. I am sure it was just an algo glitch, but a rather lame error to make.
  • Well, silly is right up Digg's alley, but it's a huge bandwidth waste if it's just an error. I think they're trying to be slick.
  • If that was their evil plan, now that link will be associated with a bunch of IPs (as I'm sure a bunch of people will click on this link in your post).

    Hmmm, maybe that was your evil plan all along?

    Seriously though, I have no idea what might be going on with them. I'd lean towards glitch, though.

    Cheers,
    Becky
    • [1] reply
    • I hadn't thought about that, but it sure would be interesting to listen to them discuss why hundreds of IP addresses that don't have Digg accounts are showing up in their phishing scheme!
  • I signed up for digg just a few weeks ago, and ran 2 post, BOOM! they banned me?
    They said I broke there spam rules???
    I did not spam them, thats not my thing....I contacted the person that advised me to sign with them, they said they had never had any trouble?

    I was thinking of signing up again under a different email address, but will that work ?
    • [1] reply
    • Digg's definition of spam is quite different from a normal person's. To them, anything with commercial content is spam. Which is odd coming from a site that is plastered with ads, but there it is. You have to be rather subtle in your marketing there. If you post your own stuff, it needs to go to content that's going to be interesting to the Diggers. You can surround that content with your own ads, but don't try to make a commercial offer right in the post that you're promoting. You're looking for traffic, links, and SEO value, not conversions from the Diggers, because they don't buy anything.

      With just a few posts you probably didn't rate an IP ban, so you can probably just start a new account with a new email address. If you get an error screen when you try to create a new account you'll know you got an IP ban. Just change your IP address -- usually just reset your cable modem/router or leave it off overnight and your ISPs DHCP will assign you a new address. If you've got a static IP address, it can be a little more involved.

      With any new Digg account you should not post anything of your own for at least the first 30 days. Just get on the site and spend 20 minutes a day digging the submissions of others. Build up the network.
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    Is Digg Evil or Just Incompetent?

    Back in the wild west days of last summer when scripting was the in thing at Digg, my company released a couple of free Greasemonkey scripts that helped people with their Digging activities. A lot of people, including some famous ones, used it. We used these to funnel people into the paid versions of software on our site. Life was good. Then the Great Digg Purge of 2008 came down and literally 1,000s of people were banned for using scripts. Google [banned by Digg] and you'll see a lot of people complaining about it. Needless to say, it put a bit of a dent in our business model. We've recovered, but it was a tough few months. The story is at Digg is on a Banning Rampage if you're interested.