Growing Censorship Concerns at Digg

I find site rivalries boring, but growing concerns over Digg "censorship" have been submitted steadily for the last few months. Today two such stories were submitted so numerous that I had little choice but to post. The first claims that Digg is the editor's playground- it explains how a few users control Digg, and that it's not really the 'Democracy' that they claim it to be. Personally I think this is all totally within the rights of their editors to choose content however they like. But it's less pleasant when combined with accounts getting banned for posting content critical of digg, and watching other content getting removed for being critical of sponsors (also, here is Kevin Rose's reply).

Re:This should be fun

[Derek Pomery]

Aye. My account was banned years ago from moderation for moderating up a post on slashdot critical of slashdot policies.
The same happened to others.

Interesting stuff last night in Digg

[psycln]

Two front page articles got pulled off within 10 minutes of being promoted.

Users can easily create email accounts, change their IP address by resetting their router/modem and create accounts in digg to eventually digg their articles.

Non-moderated news never works. Digg _is_ moderated. The poor soles who frequent that site just don't know it. As TFA said, digg.com is more of an editor playground that a democratic proccess of picking news.

here are two examples from yesterday

Example 1 [digg.com] Example 2 [digg.com]

My view

[thedogcow]

Each website has its own specific qualities that make it good and bad. For instance, I like Digg because it is updated more frequently than Slashdot (see diggvsdot), but apparently "these updates" maybe too frequent (i.e. stories deleted). I think Slashdot has better comments. I cannot stand Digg comments. Digg comments are the same type of comments that Fark has... people talking about stuff they have no clue of. At least with Slashdot, most of the comments are made by informed people.

Re:Misinformation

[spyrochaete]

The /. story doesn't really allege anything. It just brings to light the "Growing Censorship Concerns at Digg" (RTFTitle). A concern does not equal or pretend to be a fact.

Re:This should be fun

[Troed]

Umm. You do realise there's a LOT of people on Slashdot that suddenly got their moderating priviligies (but not meta-moderation interestingly enough) removed and, as far as I know, no one has ever been told why?

Yes, I'm one of them.

Re:It's not a democracy...

[Botchka]

Have you ever used digg? Of course you can vote against a story. It's the big ass "problem?" button right under it. You can also undigg a story that you've dugg. Yes you can promote or bury as many comments as you like, but only once per comment. It may bury it for you, but depending on another persons threshold, they may still see it. Sounds to me like instead of voting on comments, you need to figure out how digg actually works..

Re:There is no democracy in the 'net

[Anonymous Coward]

"And ultimately, he hangs if something illegal happens on his page.

Actually, by U.S. law, site owners who do not exercise editorial control are expressly not liable for illegal content appearing on their sites.

Also don't forget ...

[A nonymous Coward]

... that digg is the site which claims to be user-driven. Slashdot never has. Slashdot may do slimy moderating behind the scenes, but they don't claim to be pure as the driven snow. Digg does, and digg isn't, and digg got well and truly caught and called out on it, and retaliated, and the story goes on. Evil is one thing, but evil claiming to be good is another kettle of fish altogether.

Re:This should be fun

[helix400]

Kettle, meet pot.

Add another Slashdot victom here. I used to get mod points weekly. After I complained about Michael (and got a post of mine instantly modded from +3 down to -1), I haven't seen them since.

Overall, I find it odd that CmdrTaco complains about Digg censorship, when Slashdot itself has its own glaring examples. For example, check out this thread where every single comment was modded down to -1 [slashdot.org]. Even worse, once when a thread was knocked down to -1, those who mod up anything, *anything* in that thread no longer get mod points. [kuro5hin.org]

Stories pull themselves off the front page...

[Otto]

As has been stated (and proven) many times, when enough users mark a story as lame/inaccurate/whatever, stories get taken back OFF the front page. I've had this happen. I've watched this happen. This is not the editors doing anything it's built into the system itself.

If the admins pulled it, the story would simply not be there at all. They've done this in the past. The fact that the story you point to is still there at all just shows that the editors did not do it.

DIGG the Slashdot story pulled from front page

[FerretFrottage]

A digg story referring to this /. thread did make the front page with 100+ diggs. However, the story was quickly labled as being "under review" and not soon thereafter it was gone from the front page. I actually read some of the comments and most were pretty well thought out and showed concern over whether this is an issue at digg or not. I guess those people got their answer.

Re:DIGG the Slashdot story pulled from front page

[FerretFrottage]

Here's the link to the digg story [digg.com] that got pulled (at the time of this post it had 485 diggs)

Their real problem is lack of visibility.

[Otto]

All this hue and cry of censorship seems to be simply because people don't understand the system.

A story reaches the front page by people "digging" that story. The total number of "diggs" is listed on the page.

However, a story can be yanked from the front page by people who mark it as lame or inaccurate or spam, or whatever. These numbers are NOT listed.

So when a story is yanked back off, there is no visibility as to WHY it was yanked off the front page. Lots of people seem to think that the admins do it themselves, when in fact it's some algorithim taking it off because enough people marked it down.

If they made this information visible, then there'd be less complaining. Instead of having several options like lame and so forth, they should have a simple button marked "Bury" to allow people to say that the story is stupid (or whatever they feel). Put a counter next to the bury link, to show how many people don't like it. Then when a story is autoyanked from the front page, there will be visibility. People won't have room to complain, because the story clearly got buried from people marking it down.

The REAL reason people are complaining is because of a poor user interface, not censorship.

Re:This should be fun

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Yup.
Digg.com [netcraft.com]: Rank 1150.
slashdot.org [netcraft.com]: Rank 62.

Re:This should be fun

[Skim123]

This is why I was/am a fan of Kuro5hin.org. User-submitted content, but it must (slowly) be voted out from an article queue where it has a chance to be "peer reviewed." It leads to some very well-written and interesting essays/stories/commentaries. But it's clearly not built to handle "breaking news" like Digg & /.

Personally, I don't see the point of censorship at all unless it's spam and other such content. E.g., on my blog I've had a variety of negative comments left by readers about me, the site, my work, etc. But Rob et al should know that you can't sanely publish on the Internet unless you can take it all with a grain of salt. Now spam, on the other hand, is quickly deleted...

Re:This should be fun

[Mr. Flibble]

Interestingly, I have been banned from moderation for a long time. Apparently for just viewing certain posts or something. I don't remember the details.

Interesting because I have had this account for quite some time, and I (used to) Meta-Moderate on a daily basis. I also used my mod points to mod up, and not down. It was very rare indeed for me to mark someone as a troll or similar. Still, I followed a link to a supposed "forbidden" criticism of slashdot and such, and read all the posts therin, and I have not had moderation privilages since.

I have since stopped meta-moderating as much because, well, while I like slashdot, and it is my homepage on Firefox, I am somehow no longer appreciated or something, or maybe not trusted. I don't know.

Its funny really, when people like you and me are the ones for making slashdot what it is. Sure, there are posts about various stories, but what MAKES slashdot are the comments. For example, I have always found this thread: http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129489&c id=10801729 [slashdot.org] to be pure gold.

What digg aspires to be is a more "open" version of slashdot, whether it achives that or not we will see. Either way, the competition has been good, I suppose everyone has noticed the quick little changes in how slashdot works now? When this site has not changed much in the last five years?

No matter the outcome, the shakedown on this is bound to be good... It would be nice though, to have mention of the reason users like me are suddenly not allowed to moderate, as opposed to just having it vanish - apparently for "viewing" the wrong threads...

Re:This should be fun

[mrdaveb]

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/stats/topsites [netcraft.com]

Google is #1
Yahoo is #2
MySpace is #83

And you are an anonymous idiot