Blacklisted by Digg!

We, iliketotallyloveit.com, now carry the dubious distinction of being blocked, banned and blacklisted by Digg. The verdict? Spam, dammit! As a social shopping site with a growing community behind us, we are acutely aware of this problem, so we take the allegation seriously and apologize to Digg users who might have been inconvenienced.

However, we also think that Digg’s approach to this issue is heavy handed (c’mon, a brief note to our tech. support could have resolved this with dignity) and reveals cognitive dissonances between the claims of online democracy and the decidedly more dictatorial reality.

We inquired with Digg Support and share their reply with a few thoughts and annotations. (Digg’s statement and passages from their FAQ and ToS in italics.)

Why?

The [iliketotallyloveit.com] domain has been consistently reported by the Digg community as a spam site and a news middle man site.

What do you consider “spam” and a “news middleman”?

When submitting content to Digg, please link directly to the originating source of that content. Blog posts are fine, as long as they're not plagiarized and don't just summarize the content. However, if any URL within Digg is consistently flagged as spam by the Digg community, that URL may be blocked from future submissions.

Yes, iliketotallyloveit.com links to online merchandisers who sell the products that users post on our site with their own reviews, comments and notes, thus adding value to the original source. If this qualifies as spam, Digg would need to shut out thousands of other sites, otherwise blackballing iliketotallyloveit would look arbitrary, right?

We didn’t think they’d be so rude, so we submitted postings from Reddit, del.icio.us, buzz.yahoo.com, mister-wong.com, lifestream.fm, twitter.com, netvibes.com, mixx.com, popurls.com, stumbleupon.com and from social shopping sites like buzzillions.com, crowdstorm.com, epinions.com, kaboodle.com, osoyou.com, shopstyle.com, stylefeeder.com, stylehive.com, thisnext.com, wishpot.com, zebo.com, wists.com. It worked every time, so our originating sources can’t be the reason for the ban.

Could it be voting envy?

Another reason might be that we too allow users to vote for their favorite products. In our early days we were often labeled a Digg clone, which didn’t thrill us, because it dismisses our focus on community-driven online shopping. Again, we gave them the benefit of the doubt and submitted content to Digg from other services that at one time or another were anointed Digg clones like sk-rt.com, meneame.net, bringr.com, videobomb.com, diglog.com, yigg.de, dzone.com, sportsflip.com, hugg.com, sphinn.com, deals.com, newsheat.com, agentb.com, dealigg.com, pixelgroovy.com, scoreguru.com, videosift.com, urlbump.com, tubigg.com, vroomr.net, playgroundbaby.com. And none of these sites appeared to be blocked.

What constitutes “abuse”?

Reading Digg’s FAQ stokes the suspicion that it is ridiculously easy to report anything or anyone as offensive or abusive.

If you encounter abuse, please email us at abuse@digg.com. Please be sure to include the URL of the page where you found the … abuse occurring and any other pertinent details.

For the past 12+ months we tracked 60 submissions to Digg from our domain. That works out to approximately five per month, on average. If that qualifies as abuse, you probably haven’t opened your inbox in a while.

So who’s calling the shots?

When submitted domains are consistently reported as spam, the domain is blocked from further submission. Unblocking the domain is not in line with the interests of the Digg community.

Really? Listen up, community: Digg knows best what’s in line with your interests. But then again, they don’t really need your interests and complaints to block domains, remove content or whole accounts. From the ToS:

Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content), or for no reason at all.

To circle back to the beginning, a quote from How Digg Works:

Digg is democratizing digital media. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you.

Reviewing the facts, as they are known to us, we cannot help but think that Digg is slightly disingenuous with their claims and handles complaints arbitrarily, thus undermining the community concept and their own credibility.

But that’s just us. What do you think?