Digg's Inner Circle

We all know who they are. Mr. Babyman. Badwithcomputer. Zaibatsu. These people live on the front page of Digg. Check out their profiles and you find they get 25%-40% of their submissions to go popular. That is a terrific percentage. It pays $10 million+ a year in baseball. I imagine it also pays rather well on Digg. Most of us heard the rumors about corporations paying for front page results. Hell, we all know that it is worth a few grand to the right company.

I wrote how Digg is run by a bunch of communists. Kevin Putin is reigning with an iron fist. He is protecting those who made him. Sadly for him (happily for everyone else), he is banking on the wrong people. An organization needs to grow and expand. While he might have three million registered users, there are a lot less who actually visit on a regular basis. I only need to look at my fan list to see all those who signed up and never returned to the site. My guess is that is over 25% of my fan base.

This week the "reds" at Digg cleaned house banning eveyone who used a script. As mentioned in this article, people had their accounts closed based upon suspicion. Digg did not take the time to determine if these people indeed did cheat the system. Obviously, some of that group deserved what they got. However, I personally know of at least two people who did not use a script of any kind. It matters little to Kevin Putin and his gang.

This makes me wonder: why were these people banned? It seems there is something more to this equation than a few scripts making lives easier. I believe the protection of the inner circle was at the core of this. There was not a single member of this elite group banned even though there was documented cases of script using based upon digg times. One post even copied the digg times of MrBabyman to show that he dugg 80+ in less that three minutes. To me, this is more evidence of cheating than provided by those who were actually banned by Digg. Yet, MrBabyman is in the inner circle. The ones banned were not.

Everyone whose account was closed had many diggs. They were the "up and comers" on Digg, having amassed 15,000 or more diggs. These were the people who were starting to get a few stories on the front page. This is a threat to Kevin's cherished inner group. Thus, he needed to protect them. How Hitleresque of him? He pulled out the cyberspace version of the gas chamber. Eliminate those you do not like.

Personally, I hope his piece of crap enterprise collapses. Many will say that is impossible since Digg is so established. Lehman Brothers was established also and look at what happened to them. Google backed away from the deal to acquire Digg. They also discount the traffic that is sent to a site since they know there is a chance it is a farce. Digg is manipulated from the top down. On there, life is not a democracy. Welcome to Russia Comrade!

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