As a few know (and for those who do not, now you do know), I intern for the wiki named FanHistory.com. Unfortunately in the past they were banned from Digg because of apparent spamming, and partially past wankage (wank), this is a case based on a past grudge. This was done originally as one of those ‘I am excited to have a site, but not exactly aware of how to properly promote my content.’
However, after some time, I thought that I would contact Digg and ask them to reconsider their stance, since I could not even bookmark some of FanHistory’s blog entries. Although it seemed I received a human response about reconsidering, I am willing to bet that no matter even if FanHistory becomes a very informational resource (which it has become to an extent. Example: There was an article called Trending Topics: 5 Ways Companies Used News Trends for Business Success on Mashable not long ago), that Digg may have been just have looked, replied, and then deleted.
In fact, this is the reply I got (and Digg was great at replying promptly, just so you know):
Does Digg differentiate between spam and spamming?
Spam is very subjective. Many times, the spammer honestly doesn’t think they are spammers, so we generally leave that up to the Digg community to decide with the report/bury feature. We may delete users who blatantly and consistently submit obvious spam. Additionally, comment spam is against our TOS and will result in an account ban or deletion, depending on the severity. Submission spamming is different because it may be quality content but the submitter is “spamming” every story from their blog/site. While we welcome users to submit their own content, overdoing it often incites the users to mark the user as a spammer, the site as a spam site, and otherwise decent content as blogspam. We recommend considering this before you engage in this activity. Remember, if domains are consistently buried and reported as spam, the site may be
banned.Because unblocking your domain would not be in line with the best interests of the larger Digg community, we cannot reverse this decision. But we’ll take your feedback into consideration.
So basically Digg even says that submitting your own blog content to Digg on your own account can be considered blog spam by them. Now, I can see spamming off topic material that constantly asks people to purchase something is definitely spam. However, good articles… what is the point if you cannot get your own content out there in the community. Also, you cannot like your own posts and submit them?
So I guess I should come to a point about this by now. Be careful about what and how you bookmark your articles on any social bookmark site. When you sign up, read the site’s terms of service. Even if you think it is dumb, it could save you a headache later on. Ignorance may not save you from an being unbanned later down the road because the site rules are available and easily accessible. In fact, these services do not try to hide them because if they did, it could look bad.
Should social bookmarking places like Digg look further into what classifies as blog spam? What do you think?
(Note: This is not an attack on Digg. I like their services, but I think more should be done in the area of classifying spam.)
I feel that Digg should have a clear set policy on what is and is not spam – letting the community decide is a bad idea all across the board. If someone has a grudge against a user or blog, they could potentially have their friends start tagging that user or blog as a spammer and end up getting that person banned for no good reason.
Digg’s current method of going about this allows people to mark as spam pretty much anything they do not like. So if I digg an article that you do not like, you could easily report it/mark it as spam. Do it enough times and I could lose my account.
This is one of the reasons I do not use social bookmarking – because I feel that it should have clear cut rules and regulations, not fly by the seat of their pants and user whims.
I will be making sure to put something into the TOS for Blogrity. Right now it is in Alpha mode, so right now, I am basically flying by the seat of my pants.
After this incident, it made me think about my own social bookmark site and how I will shape it to hopefully become a fair website. I think because Digg is so big that they do not have the staff needed to look into situations within the community and only take what is said and act. Like the act now and never ask questions later (not act now and ask questions later.)