The Digg Effect – Corrupted?

Over the last 2 days, a huge controversy has erupted over the apparent super-editorial rights exercised by some Digg administrators to “kill” stories in the digg queue.

It started with this article, which pointed out that something was not right in the number of diggs listed for 2 stories.

It appears shortly thereafter the article was pulled and the entire domain was banned. Any attempts to further submit the article results in warnings that your digg account is under threat. From the original site, the 2nd part of the story.

Eventually Kevin Rose of Digg replied, but the PR nightmare was in full swing by then.

Most interestingly, Slashdot got into the act and posted an article, which attracted a host of comments on slashdot’s own moderation policy.

In the end, I think it should be accepted that in any website, the people who started the website will always feel they know what is best for “their” website. If that means granting themselves super-user rights in a “democractic” site, that is to be expected. George Orwell got in right in 1984 and what he said there applies to almost any co-operative human endevaour.

If Digg bots manage to push spurious stories to the front page, I would expect a digg reader to have the brains either not to click on the link, or actively remove it from the queue. Hollering about perceived censorship is just hot air.