If you noticed that Digg posted a blog article announcing the retirement of Digg Spy, then you read this:

"One issue I suspect may be brought up is that Digg Spy is one place on the site that surfaces some burying activity. People have tried using Digg Spy to track burying activity and I won't be surprised if conspiracy theorists accuse us of burying (pun intended) the feature to hide this. In fact, only a very small subset of buries on the site actually appeared on Digg Spy due to the small window of activity that was actually visible through the feature and any "patterns" that people perceived by watching the buries have always been grossly inaccurate."

The fact that Daniel Burka felt the need to include that paragraph shows that he knew exactly how wrongheaded their thinking was.

Let me translate for you: Digg, which prides itself on being democratic and transparent, has decided to go from murky to completely dark. If Digg were really acting transparently, buries would be visible. You'd be able to see both "Who Dugg This?" and "Who Buried This?" in their interface. In the short term, it would be very easy for them to just add a /buries endpoint in their API. Their reasoning of "you could only see a few buries" just doesn't cut it. Now we're going from a just a little bit of visibility into absolutely nothing. For a company that thinks of itself as a Web 2.0 leader, they really don't get it.

It's Going to Break Some Software Out There

I suppose it doesn't bother Digg that they're going to invalidate the work of outside developers. Poisoning the ecosystem is never a good way to build a following. You wouldn't see Google do something like that. Perhaps culture clash was one of the reasons the acquisition deal didn't go through.

It will be interesting to see if the Digg Alerter still works after Diggspy is taken down. Hopefully it won't just lock up when it can't connect to the Diggspy to monitor buries. Long time users of the PMS Social Suite will notice that we had to remove bury monitoring from our tracking screens. There's just no way to know now.

A Toxic Environment

Digg has created a toxic environment by being secretive about buries. Digg's biggest problem isn't the script users, it's the Bury Brigade. Roving bands of high school children are terrorizing fine upstanding citizens on Digg by burying stories they disagree with. Having perfectly good stories get knocked out of consideration for the front page has probably done more to turn off potential power users than any other aspect of Digg. If Digg wants to grow its user base, they're going to have to make the environment more inviting. And that means getting a leash on some of their undesirables.

The flip side to this argument if that if Digg were transparent about buries then we'd all have more insight into the algorithm and thus they'd be a victim of more gaming. But this just doesn't cut it. Even if you have perfect numbers, you can't completely reverse engineer the underlying algorithm. There are just too many variables. Google's data is completely available for anyone -- you can go look at all the pages in their results and do your own analysis. Yet outside of Google, nobody knows what the real algorithm is despite literally hundreds of thousands of very bright people trying to figure it out. And they're free to tweak their algorithm every day if they wish. Reddit's algorithm is open source and it doesn't hurt them.

It has also been claimed that if buries were public there would be more disagreements among users. I guess that's because Digg believes that secrecy breeds trust. Of course, the real problem is that when people are able to hide behind complete anonominity and not take responsibility for their actions they're willing to do horrible things to each other. If Digg wants to make the bury brigade behave, then just make bury information available. The backstabbing would go away. How many people automatically assume that someone who made a less than positive comment about their submission buried it? If the information were open everyone would be a lot better behaved.

The underlying problem is that Digg gives buries way too much weight. Of course there's no way to know, but everyone I've ever talked to has the impression there is not a one-to-one value differential between diggs and buries. Digg could of course clear this up by making the data public, but it seems they think we should just trust them.

Fix the Spam Bans

You only have to look at the number of quality sites that have been banned from Digg as spam to see the problem. Digg's complete lack of any review or appeal process for banned sites is pathetic. Say what you will about Promote My Site, it's not a spam site. If it is, I'd like to know where our checks are from our advertisers! While many in the Digg Community may not agree with what we have to say here, we're not spammers. Most of the children on Digg don't understand that just because you don't like something doesn't make it spam. If the spam report data was public, then most of these issues would be cleared up. People would only be willing to mark the truly spammy sites as spam.

An easy fix for the spam problem would be to make the spam data completely open. When a site gets marked as spam, it would get a flag on articles that says "Users have reported this site as spam." Diggers could then go to a separate page and vote and comment on whether they really think the site is spam. That way you wouldn't have sites whose articles received several hundred diggs get marked as spam by a few brats and have quality content removed from the system.

Don't Sweat the Buries

Getting the to front page is great work if you can get it, but it shouldn't be the reason you're working with Digg if you're trying to promote commercial content. A front page on Digg can bring a ton of traffic, but it won't monetize very well. Diggers don't click ads and since living in your Mom's basement doesn't provide a lot of disposable income they don't tend to buy very much. Even if you're making money from ad impressions, it still probably isn't worth the time and effort it takes to get a front page.

Let's make a baseball analogy. It's much better to be a .500 hitter than racks up singles, doubles, and triples rather than a .050 hitter that hits home runs. The home runs just aren't enough to make up for all the strike outs, even if you're a home run leader.

If you can consistently get a story to 100 Diggs, then you can build a lot of search engine love. If your friend list that will consistently vote your stories are mostly PR 3/4 profiles, you've got a powerful SEO machine. The long term benefit from being able to dominate a keyword niche on Google will far outlast the flood of traffic from a Digg front page. The traffic you get from the search engines is far more valuable -- those are people that are looking for what you have and are ready to buy.

It's not a flashy strategy. It won't make you famous. But it will make you money. The last time I checked, not many stores accepted fame as payment.