In an article called “The Ban Hammer falls again over at Digg“, by none other than former Top Digger Zaibatsu, it was reported that another 57 Diggers were banned. Almost immediately reports of another 10 to 20 Diggers were found to be struck by Digg’s mighty hammer. The last time the “Ban Hammer” fell, it landed right on Digg’s Number 3 Top User, Zaibatsu, this time it struck number 5 Top User, Supernova17, and number 34 Top User, OptimusPrime, along with others.

According to Social Blades’ Top 1000 Banned Users page, approximately 103 Top 1000 users have been banned and of that figure 12 were Top 100 Users. Zaibatsu and Supernova17 were the only 2 Top 10 Users banned so far.

This propells OptimusPrime1 ahead of Zaibatsu’s in the “Very Questionable” category where the Bannings are concerned. Optimus has been gone on ‘holiday’ for the past week and is not expected to return until later this month, this gives rise to the question of “What could a Digg member possibly do to violate the TOS when he hasn’t been around a computer for a week prior to the banning?”.

The reply from Digg will surely be “justified”, in their view, but unless the reply is along the lines of “We are sorry, we made a mistake… we intended to ban another OptimusPrime instead” then expectations are that this will further drive the wedge into the “trust” issue between Digg and many of it’s members.

Digg release a statement on 3 October, concerning Script Abuse. The statement goes as follows:

Digg: Update on Script Abuse
by Jen Burton at 8am, Oct 3rd, 2008 in Digg Community

Hey all –

Digg enforces its Terms of Use so that Digg remains a vibrant community of people committed to sharing and discovering great content. Everyone who uses Digg agrees to abide by the TOU, which maintains a positive experience on Digg for all community members by prohibiting spam, porn, gaming, hate speech etc.

In many cases, Digg gives users who violate the TOU a second and sometimes even a third chance. When people continue to violate the TOU, or where a first-time violation is egregious, Digg is reluctantly left with no option but to ban the user.

A couple weeks ago we posted a blog entry regarding script usage, reminding members of the community that it violates the Digg TOU. We also rolled out some changes that warned users when unnatural Digging activity was detected. Since this post, we analyzed our logs on a regular basis to clearly identify script use over an extended period of time.

While we never speak to specific instances of user bans to protect the privacy of individual users, we have banned a small number of users for script use over the past several weeks. Some of them are active users that are well known within the Digg Community. While we’ll sincerely miss the contributions of these individuals and are never happy about playing policeman, we believe that the larger Digg community is adversely impacted by people who choose to violate the TOU.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@digg.com with questions or feedback. We’re continuously researching and investigating this process, so don’t be shy and let us know what you think.

Have a good one,
Jen

Give me a break, Jen, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday, ok? Don’t insult my intelligence and integrity by trying to tell me that “Digg knows when a user is using a script”. Tell the truth, Digg is looking at stats and “guessing”. In addition they are not even confronting the ‘accused’ with the allegation to try to find out what is going on so that they could fix their system – they simply are making the judgment that the member is committing a violation and banning any account that ’seems” to be getting higher stats than Digg expects.

One reason I can say this with 100% faith in my conviction is that I personally know a member of Digg who was banned for using scripts, and I know he has no scripts on his computer – all 4,000 posts dugg that day were 100% organic. Digg just saw the number of diggs and reacted with out finding out how it was done.

Since I know for a fact this happened once, I have no reason to doubt that others were banned by Digg for the wrong reasons. It may be that only a small percentage of the so-called innocents are truly innocent… but it does happen and it happens more than Digg wishes to admit. While Digg’s graphs show Digg rapidly on the decline, the same Alexa site shows sites like Mixx on the rise. Who do you think these new members of these other sites are? If you guessed “Diggers”, they you are correct for many of them are.

At this stage of the game Digg really doesn’t want to drive it’s members away, instead it wants to bring these members more into line with the Digg Policies and TOS. You don’t persuade these people to tow the line by singling them out and banning them with out giving them a chance to change their ways. If Digg isn’t careful they will find that Mixx, or another site, is suddenly ‘the place to be’ and Digg will be sitting there with a site that isn’t worth the money that was put into it.

The hot topic of the past 24 hours has been the fact that Digg’s Number 3 Top User was banned by Digg, but he wasn’t banned for the usual reasons. According to Zaibatsu, in the article “I was banned by Digg and for a pretty lame reason“, Zaibatsu stated:

“I had linked directly to the pictures of the digg user on her site. However the site owner apparently redirected the site to a spam site after my initial post.“

While searching Google, I found a link to an article called “Digg User Zaibatsu banned because of me“, the admin of Jackie’s Jungle stated:

“Recently, I was informed that Zaibatsu, one of Digg’s (digg.com) superusers was banned from the website because he placed two posts linking to my gallery.“

Wait a second here, let’s back the trolley up… since when are photos in a gallery “SPAM“? Something is wrong here somewhere, images – no matter how suggestive they may be — are not considered as Spam by any legitimate definition of the word. The only thing that makes images Spam is if they are being sold, or used to sell something. So what gives?

This is where reading on pays off, Jackie (and I presume that is her name) states:

“Basically, as I heard over the internet broadcast last night @ ustream.tv around 3:00am my time, he noticed I was digging his articles. He visited my site, realized hey I’m not ugly, and posted a link on Digg which lead to my gallery because he found me to be a cute digger. Digg banned him because they say he violated the terms or agreement by promoting my panty sale.

As we were all informed yesterday, Zaibatsu was not even aware I had a panty sale. Like most Digg users he diggs things without even reading them. Regardless if I am selling panties on my site or not, neither of his links lead to the actual post about the sale. They went strictly to my gallery which has absolutely nothing for sale. Therefore he is completely innocent of these alleged crimes and should not be banned from Digg.”

Ok, some things are made a little clearer, but why would a site that just happened to be selling a product be considered as Spam when the site is obviously not all about being commercial? This ties into an article posted on the City Social Marketing site months ago called “SPAM“. In that article, the author stated:

“In general, the term SPAM has come to mean whatever a person thinks SPAM means. Some think that if you post one message, which is off-topic or irrelevant, then it is SPAM. Others think any multiple postings of a similar view, in one or more message threads, is SPAM. Still there others think that SPAM is only something which is applicable to E-Mail. The definition of the word “SPAM” is definitely subjective, however the idea it as being a subjective thing, which is something solely up to the Individual to decide, is a wrong assumption to promote in the various forums around the net. It is wrong due to the fact that it sets the site up for future, potential problems.“

The fact is that just because a site being linked to sells something, it doesn’t mean that an item which links to the site promotes the commercial aspects of the site – nor does it automatically constitutes Spam. If it did then any links to Digg would be considered as spam, any links to CNN or MSNBC would be considered as Spam, and in general any site linking to a site which has any ads at all on them would be considered as Spam. If Spam did take into account this type of definition then places like Digg would be forced to shut down because over 95% of the items submitted links to some site which offers ads selling products or services. No matter how subjective the definition of Spam is, there has to be a commonality in the definitions to make one’s personal definition valid.

I’ve read the article on City Social Marketing, “Digg Uprroar: Zaibatsu banned by Digg” and noted that it appeared a couple of hours before the blog post from Jackie’s Blog appeared. The article made some good points, but sadly like most of the previous articles… not all the facts were out yet. Sometimes it takes days for the facts to unfold. The idea of Zaibatsu being set up may not have been planned, but the idea that some troll could set up any digger is still real enough. CSM was right, Digg has to take this into account and try to avert a situation using such tactics in the future. They can do this by a number of ways, but the first way is to get rid of the idea that just because someone makes a complaint that the one being complained about will automatically be banned. Digg needs a policy of approaching members about a possible TOS Violation and hearing the other side of the issue.

In Jackie’s article, she states:

“Digg isn’t that great anyway. Upon further investigation it turns out a lot of people hate Digg. Here are the 7 posted reasons why digg sucks:

7. In order to get known on Digg one needs to invest a lot of time in their social network.“

I will beg to differ with her, Digg is a great site – potentially speaking that is. Digg has all of the things in place to make it a tremendous success – if it is handled properly. The longer it is being mismanaged, the worse it will become.

If Digg wants the great site that it can become, Digg has to hire someone and put them in charge of the daily operations of the site, as opposed to the technical side. This person has to have the time and be willing to expend the effort to ride heard on Users who are abusing the system. They have to give this admin a limited “Free Hand” in managing the site. In the process some Diggers will leave, but most of them will be the abusers and who gives a fig about them. In return this Admin can do his or her utmost to bring more people to digg by various methods.

What I mean by a limited “Free Hand” is that the admin will come up with a plan of attack, he or she then will run this plan by those at Digg. Once Digg approves the plan, then they take a back seat and work on the things they want to work on, like the technical end which they seem good at. They leave the mundane crap of running the Digg forum to the Admin they chose.

The Admin, in turn, would seek out a team of “Moderators”. He or she would approach these potential Mods with the proposition that these people be the voluntary eyes and ears of the Admin. Whenever they see something wrong, they immediate shoot off an email to the Admin – or make contact via IM. The admin goes and investigates, take whatever action is necessary, then moves on to the next problem.

Now, Digg sets up the “Contact Digg” link that is for complaints to an email account that this admin has access. He or she reads and answers the emails, most of this probably can be done by the use of standard replies (which it seems Digg already uses). The Admin also can set up a method where Digg Users can have a chance at stating their case to appeal a decision to ban.

This is only a part of what Digg could do, and I just happen to know a guy who would be willing to accept the position for a mere $75,000 a year. LoL (Ok, relax people… it’s a joke.)

The drawbacks is that an admin of this sort has to be prepared to have certain people butter up to him or her, while being bomblasted by his detractors. Solution: Don’t announce who is in charge, perhaps this person can be called DiggAdmin and it is forbidden for the person holding that account to actually participate in the daily postings on Digg… except in the role of the Admin. Now this person could use his or her regular nickname and do as they want, but it is probably best if the Admin quit using Digg completely. Perhaps Digg can cover that by banning the Admin’s regular account so that it appears the person just simply went away.