I just found out that this piece about IE testing with Parallels hit the digg.com front page briefly at some point on Tuesday. The comments over there are pretty much unanimously in favor of having me dragged out into the street and shot.
The funny thing about Digg is that it changes the way people read. The average Digger seems to assume that people write stuff solely for the purpose of making it to the Digg front page. My article was clearly a cheap ploy to capitalize on the recent buzz around Parallels combined with reports on battery explosions to drive traffic to my ad-ridden site. Or I’m being paid by Microsoft to spread negative press about the Mac. NO, I’m a Firefox fanboy that hates Microsoft, Apple, and Parallels. It’s crazy.
No one knows you there so you have to write in a way that is completely void of who you are and what you’re about. That sucks. I’d rather just opt out of the popularity contest (and I did – see below).
Here’s some examples of the presumptuous attitude you find in comments there:
This story should focus more on the actual problem: that is, that the power cord was faulty.
First, I’m not writing a “story” for Digg Corporation and, to be honest, I have very little interest in improving my writing to better serve the Digg “community”.
Second, if I was formally reporting a power cord issue, I would do it with AppleCare.
The point of the post was simply to share (with other developers) an anecdote about a common occurrence in software development: sometimes you take a step forward and two steps back. In this case, IE testing became a bit easier but seemed to cause a hardware failure. The pattern seems to repeat itself over and over in software development, this iteration was just more bizarre than most.
Put that on the Digg front page and somehow it becomes an attack on Apple, Microsoft, Parallels, Web Standards, World of Warcraft, and George W. Bush.
Not the internet’s fault this guy is an idiot. MY POWER CHORD MELTED? MUST BE MICROSOFT’S FAULT!
Okay, a “POWER CHORD” is something you strum on a guitar.
And when did I ever insinuate this could possibly be Microsoft’s fault? We know the power cord should not melt and Apple makes the power cord. It would seem to be an hardware issue set off by running multiple instances of Parallels but I really don’t know because I haven’t done any extensive research on the issue and, more importantly, I really don’t care. I pretty much assume stuff will break like this every once in a while and just try to move past it as soon as possible.
Nice MacGyver (aka duct taping) skills.
Now that’s a proper comment! Using duct tape for something that requires electrical tape is asinine, it’s also a little funny.
403 Go Away!
Anyway, the whole experience has freaked me out to the point that I’d rather not have to deal with it so I’m blocking digg traffic. Here’s how it works.
In Rails, I modified the controller to send back a 403 Forbidden response when we detect someone coming from digg.com:
before_filter :only => :permalink do |controller|
if controller.request.env['HTTP_REFERER'] =~ /^http:\/\/(www\.)?digg\.com/
controller.render :action => 'terrified', :status => 403, :layout => false
false
else
true
end
end
The response looks something like this:
$ curl -e http://digg.com -si http://tomayko.com/weblog/2006/12/23/parallels-makes-ie-suck-less
HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Content-Length: 363
Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2006 10:50:25 GMT
Status: 403
Cache-Control: no-cache
Server: Mongrel 0.3.13.3
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
<html>
<head><title>Go Away!</title></head>
<body>
<h1>403 Go Away!</h1>
<p>The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it because
you're coming from <a href='http://digg.com'>digg.com</a> and the proprieter
of this system is frankly terrified by you people. Authorization will not
help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated.</p>
</body>
</html>
Don’t believe me? You can test by following the link back here from this page on digg.com.
Comments
So what happens if the diggers are browsing with referrer logging disabled? No 403.
By the way, I read your site through the PlanetPython RSS feed http://www.planetpython.org/rss20.xml.
— Eugene on Friday, December 29, 2006 at 11:03 PM #
Heh, a recent xkcd comes to mind:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/youtube.png
The digg culture is nuts, IMO. Thing is, most articles DO seem to be written primarily to hit the front page (Top n lists, Mac/Win/Linux flamebait, etc), and the content quality is pretty low overall. I think maybe its caught up a lot of newish internet users in an online community for the first time, and while it’s technically orientated, the average technical ability is very low. Of course software can cause a hardware failure!
Also, a heads up, your access control doesn’t seem to be working, for me anyway (on Firefox 2.0/Ubuntu 6.10). I click through from digg to the original page fine.
— wavydavy on Friday, December 29, 2006 at 11:16 PM #
Eugene wrote:
I’m not too worried about it. When you get the 403 there’s a link to this article and you could always copy the URL into a new browser so it’s trivial to get around. I’m mainly interested in making sure nothing hits the front page. If the 403 hits even 50% of the time it should stop any chance of that.
wavydavy wrote:
Hmm. I’ll check into that. Any chance you have referer reporting turned off? There’s probably an about:config setting for it.
— Ryan Tomayko on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 12:37 AM #
Ryan, Hilarious post :) right on the money.
— Corey on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 03:39 AM #
Kudos on a great post.
Reddit and StumbleUpon traffic is better anyways.
— Paul -V- on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 03:59 AM #
Try reddit.com. It is Digg done right.
— Steve on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 04:01 AM #
Excellent! We should start a movement.
BTW, why not use url rewriting? Seems cleaner in that it keeps it out of your code and on the web server end.
— Tankko on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 05:05 AM #
“Try reddit.com. It is Digg done right.”
Seconded.
Oh, and, great post.
— Wade on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 05:09 AM #
If it weren’t for all the enlightening comments I’d swear most diggs came from keyword bots looking for %w{saddam nintendo apple microsoft ajax linux naked digg}. ;) But I must admit I enjoy the flurry of activity over there. In summary I would say reddit represents the supply side and digg the demand side in economics as well as thought.
— Sam on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 05:16 AM #
awesome idea. but you can still:
ctrl c ctrl t ctrl v enter and see the blog…
but, i agree, 90% of the diggers are teenage punks that have no clue what to do other than bitch..
nice blog, can i link in mine?
— beingdeviousbeingdevio.us/b on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 05:50 AM #
Great post. Thank you.
— maven on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 06:02 AM #
Digg had it’s day and now it is full of much suffering. Many of the Digg community are rude and cruel with comments that will embarrass their future selves when read in a few years.
The shock factor reward destroys the advancement of the human race. Wasting time on sites such as this actually creates negative change. Positive change is more rewarding so put down the controllers and help one person you know or do not know. Repeat.
That is a true challenge and there are no cheat codes or hacks. Good luck.
RAmen
— Joe on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 06:12 AM #
What you have written originally and this response to 403 article are wonderful. Also I agree with the those about Digg!
— Jeff on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 06:30 AM #
Setting network.http.sendRefererHeader config value to 0 prevents Firefox sending the referrer information.
— Saravanan on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 06:30 AM #
Wow, you’re fucking lame. If 99% people proclaim your a retard in England, chances are 99% of the people in Spain will to. Moral of the story: You’re a fucktard. Reddit, Digg, Fark, the concensus is unanimous.
Welcome to the internet you spoiled asshat.
— Jimmy on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 06:50 AM #
Geez, what do people think the intent of the block was? I’m sure the point was not to permanently block access for everyone that found the site through digg, the author seems way too smart (i.e. he can actually serialize his thoughts into commonly understood symbols to be parsed and processed by other entities – I believe a common word for this process is “write” and “read” respectively) to have such ludicrous delusions. The goal of getting a statement across to visitors from digg was, however, met.
Besides, opening the link and then just pressing enter in the address bar would also leave the referrer link out of the headers.
Oh, and in Opera it’s F12+r (for “Enable _r_eferrer logging”).
— Robert on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 07:05 AM #
I see another Digg veteran made his way here (I’m of course referring to “Jimmy”, who from now on will be referred to as “Mr. Asshat”.)
I totally support and condone your efforts to block diggers. Unfortunately, there’s a million more where Mr. Asshat and Mr. “Power Chord” came from, and frankly we are so much better off without them. It’s “mob rules” at it’s very, very worst.
In the interest of full disclosure, I do have a Digg account, and I do peruse Digg from time-to-time, usually via Diggdot, oops, “Doggdot”. Seems like every time I end up there, I end up burying inaccurate stories way more than I ever ‘digg’ them.
And yes, the audience at Reddit and especially Stumbleupon is much more civil and thoughtful than diggers. Please give Reddit and SU a try if you haven’t yet.
— H4rdw4r3Lu5t on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 07:08 AM #
“Try reddit.com. It is Digg done right.”
That was true once upon a time, but Reddit is fast becoming Digg’s little brother. The ability to comment in Reddit or Dogg … sorry, Digg, brings out the inner asshole in people.
— Bill on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 07:20 AM #
Huuur, hurr, right on man!
— Jimmy's brain on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 07:29 AM #
No, you weren’t any kind of an idiot before. But now you get a few flames on Digg (biggest flame-factory in the Universe), and you have to curl up into a ball and cry about it?
Sweetheart, it’s a BIG internet. Flames happen. For no reason. Hundreds of flames happen spontaneously. From people who can’t even speak English copying and pasting English flames from Usenet archives going back 20 years. At completely random targets. It’s a superstition they have, that it cures impotence. There’s also the Perl program Trollbot still running around at large, maintained by the Discordians.
Stop taking it all so personally. Or else take a break from the Internet for a while before you get an ulcer.
Oops, while I’m here: you people using the word “asshat”, that’s a coded expression for “I’m a fundamentally clueless retard whose fecal matter is impacted in my cranial cavity, who caught herpies from a goat.”
— Penguin Pete on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 07:32 AM #
Cool idea. Seems like there are more and more people willing to bend over to get their post’s up on Digg.
AD
— AdventureDad on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 07:50 AM #
Whether you’ve seen it before or not, John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory deserves consideration here.
— l.m.orchard on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 08:06 AM #
Ryan – really interesting. I wrote up my thoughts on your story here.
One of the interesting points that this raises is that there should be some type of opt-out option in Digg (just like telling a robot not spider your site via robots.txt).
— Chris Winfield on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 08:18 AM #
Welcome to the internet! Enjoy your stay, there are cookies and milk on the table if you want some.
— [m] on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 08:19 AM #
Nice article, dugg ;)
— Ewan on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 08:20 AM #
Quick, make one for reddit.com too! You are currently on the list. Warning, people are reading this! Warning!
— Bubu on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 09:30 AM #
Reddit is digg done right? Reddit is just a more politicized version of digg. Digg has top 10 lists, reddit has the atheist/agnostic sermon of the day. Digg has mac/linux fanbois, Reddit has the daily leftwing rant from kos.
For website owners digg traffic is pure trash, they hog your bandwidth, clog your feedback with inane comments (not much different than this post btw), and if you are ad supported you’ll never get back the bandwidth costs from digg visitors through ad-clicks.
Reddit I can’t say since I’ve never had a front page reddit article (not that I’ve tried, I suppose I could make one easy enough GOD MADE BUSH AND DIED should do it, tying into reddit’s narcissism of religion and liberal one-speak.
What’s really surprising though is that after the digg effect there is often the stumble-upon effect and it actually has just as much traffic as Digg (not burst, it’s more sustained over a period of days), the comments are mostly mature and helpful, and the traffic stumble-upon provides is actually a positive experience for the website. But when was the last time you heard any buzz about stumble-upon?
— annon on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 09:47 AM #
Digg was unfortunately taken over by the Apple fanboys – and reddit is also not working too great – it’s probably a sign that really good social networking is not so easy after all …
— cool on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 09:48 AM #
What an ego trip! So many words for such little content, leads me to believe that your 403 child’s play was simply a feeble expression of your inability to accept criticism. It’s not Digg buddy, it’s called humanity, and yes it scares me on occasion too. But rather than pout and take my toys home, I digg in and take part in the dialog. To help you resolve your obvious issues, please consider the pleasures of solitude and comfort that a life as a Buddhist monk might offer. It won’t be as easy to censor your fellow man, but you can still fall back on the old reliable fingers in the ears and the “Na, Na, Na …” mantra.
— Don on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 10:01 AM #
I think your a genius, you managed to write an article that got onto the front page of digg, and caused enough publicity that at least 5 other sites have linked to your post. Job done, link baiting at its best, and then to block digg, which in turns leads to yet more links and visitors, your a genius and I say so on my blog!
— Tim Nash on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 10:09 AM #
Well, I’m a regular digg user, and in defense of the digg community I’d like to say, um…sorry. We suck.
The truth is, popularity itself has killed digg, but by sifting through for obscure good articles (and the even more rare constructive conversations) you CAN actually still find a lot that’s worthwhile. The problem is just that all the crap floats to the top, and the first commenter or three often sets the tone for the conversation, potentially ruining the response to even the good articles. It’s a particularly interesting and challenging exercise to seek out the times that I can say something useful and accurate with a positive feedback (or at least without getting buried), and many threads can easily be identified as ones where any such effort would be wasted. The threads for the articles from your site were just such ones, but I felt something needed to be said, so I came here.
Anyway, I applaud your reaction, as too often the slighted just whimper in a corner, or pretend that they don’t care, or set out to prove they can be flamers and jerks too. Naturally, you’re getting flamed all over again because of that response, but I’d just like to point out that these threads do NOT represent the average views of diggers, or even anything close to it. Anyone with a hint of maturity knows better than to participate in these threads, and moves on.
Also, I wanted to point out that it wouldn’t take much to get your domain(s) banned from digg, if you really wanted it to leave you alone. If they won’t accommodate you directly, just self-submit a bunch of obvious spam articles on a separate spoof site and game the system to put them on the front page. Otherwise, digg will stalk you like the plague, regardless of the referrer block.
I’ll shut up now. If this were digg, I’d be buried for article length. :P
— HonoredMule on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 10:09 AM #
The referrer checking is an excellent idea. A visit from Digg users does no good for most sites, and most Digg users are knuckle-dragging morons. (No offense to the few of you who can make intelligent comments; there just aren’t enough of you to justify reading the comments.)
— Withheld on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 10:12 AM #
Hah! Nice, but I think you should do something more insidious.
How about you 302 them to a random selection of domain parker sites, you know, the ones with a bazillion bid-text/adsense based ad listings on it.
You should cookie the inbound digg users as well with a digg-sucks cookie that doesn’t expire for like a year or so. Check for the dig-sucks cookie in your main response handler, and if that exists redirect them as well. That way unless they pasted the link in from digg, or came in from elsewhere, you can continue to re-direct the user to spam pages until they clean their cookies.
This will work nicely, although again not 100% digg-moron-proof.
grin
caveat: there is some vagueness over browsers accepting and recording cookies on non 200 http response code requests, since 302 is not an error response you should be fine.
— dickrebel on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 10:54 AM #
digg has jumped the shark and is now dying as fast as it arose. there is more drivel on digg than anything else, the amount of SPAM has just grown huge, and everyone’s learned the trick of linking to their own website as an intermediary to the actual article so they can get some hits for the google adverts plastered all over their worthless no-original-content website.
— x666 on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 11:32 AM #
<claps> Good for you. Digg'ers level of IQ has gone downhill, and most of the comments on posts are downright stupid. One of the many reasons a lot of people have moved away from digg. In fact, I just took an informal poll on an IRC channel I am on, and out of about 40 that responded, only 2 actually read digg on a daily basis, and 31/40 said that digg wasn’t worth the read any longer. The joke became what the real name of digg should be.. diggspam, spamfordigg, etc.
— ML on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 01:32 PM #
Ever since the Diggers got their own super fancy elastic user-generated content of a website, they act like they own the bleepin internet. Which.they.don’t.com.
— Machine Operator on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 02:11 PM #
Don’t look now, Ryan, but there’s a digg article about the fact that you’re blocking digg.
And Jimmy, please learn the differences between “your” and “you’re” and “too” and “to” before you proclaim anyone else an asshat. Oh and learning to spell “consensus” will get you bonus points.
— DTrain on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 02:19 PM #
Ugh. Digg is moonbatty enough as it is; I was thinking of trying Reddit because of it. Thanks for the tip on that—I’d rather watch PBS Kids teevee than watch moonbats rant on teh intertubes (at least little kids have a good excuse for their immaturity!).
Ryan, funny post. Digg is a farking joke. Sometimes it’s useful for finding stuff that I wouldn’t find at my normal haunts, but 98% of the comments are cringe-inducing. These flamers that came here to bitch about it just prove your point. (Oversensitive, they say? Yet they came here to complain about you not liking digg? LOL!)
— SU is much better on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 03:45 PM #
Ryan: if you’re so inclined, you can make it more obnoxious by placing the 403 behind a redirect. That way, the browser will change the address bar before running into the wall, so the user can’t just focus the URI and copy it to try again – they have to hit Back and dig the link back out (no pun intended). I’m not proposing this because it provides better “security” – it doesn’t, of course. It’s meant as a social design measure to increase the friction for circumventing your block, to keep away that portion of diggers who know how to do it but don’t actually care enough to persist when faced with some inconvenience.
— Aristotle Pagaltzis on Saturday, December 30, 2006 at 09:22 PM #
Just hit F5 and you have no referrer.
— Riddle on Sunday, December 31, 2006 at 01:10 AM #
Good for you. Don’t blame you a bit.
— gman on Sunday, December 31, 2006 at 06:11 AM #
Someone said they were going to consider giving reddit “a try”. Is it really that hard?
— fez on Sunday, December 31, 2006 at 12:06 PM #
Um, Ryan? I went to Digg, clicked back, got your error message. I clicked into the address bar and hit return. New request with no referral, so I got to the article. You might want to make the error message into a redirect to a specific page?
But yeah, agreed, Digg scares me when I glance at it. Nice trick.
— MatGB on Monday, January 01, 2007 at 10:39 AM #
This amuses me far too much. Perhaps a nice little dictionary could be awarded to Mr. Asshat?
— Neil McGovern on Tuesday, January 02, 2007 at 03:12 AM #
As with most things that, at one time used to be fresh, original and even ‘cool’, digg has evolved into a place where people ‘yell’ at each other and digg down comments because someone dares to disagree or offer a different opinion.
Take the constant posting of "Lots of PS3 available" posts over the past two weeks. Based on the tone of the discussion, you would think people were arguing over something worthwhile, like say taxation policy or eliminating poverty or bringing democracy and hope to Africa. Nope. they were yelling at each other over game consoles.
— Vincent Clement on Tuesday, January 02, 2007 at 05:29 AM #
Although I’m not quite commenting on the tendency of social websites (digg and YouTube esp.) to descend into chaf at an alarming rate, I think your solution is brilliant.
I remember reading about a similar solution on a forum to deal with trolls. Instead of banning them (and having people just create new fake IDs) they had a troll flag or filter, and as the actions of the troll got worse and worse that flag went up. As the site loaded it read this flag and started degrading performance. Slow page loads, 404s, images not loading etc etc. The trolls ended up thinking it was a lousy site and moved on.
Not quite the same solution, but in the same lines. I think their is a lot that can be done to encourage people you don’t want to take their traffic elsewhere, without direct blocking, but appearing to degrade.
Nice one.
— Adrian on Tuesday, January 02, 2007 at 09:36 AM #
Quick heads up on your 403 page though – it’s got a typo: ‘proprieter’.
Interesting solution. I wonder how many people you’ll keep behind the floodgate and for how long.
— Adri on Wednesday, January 03, 2007 at 12:43 AM #
Way funny dude!!!
— Kevin Barnes on Thursday, January 04, 2007 at 01:46 AM #
I totally agree with the above comments – I’ve been a long time digg-user, but have stopped as I realised that diggers are only beaten in stupidity by the youtube crowd. It’s not worth the time or bandwidth. Someone mentioned stumbleupon – it’s fantastic, one of my sites got stumbled, and I got sent a few thousand visitors over a week or so to a site I’d just opened, with a number of them leaving constructive and interesting comments.
As for your 403'ing them, I think a 412: Precondition Failed would be more appropriate – the precondition being intelligence, of course.
Other ways of doing this at the webserver level (I’m a Python/PHP guy and don’t know how you rails guys do things – but surely this is better handled at the webserver level?) would be something like this mod_rewrite referer trick or just nuke it with the awesome mod_security.
— Simon Greenhill on Saturday, January 06, 2007 at 01:56 PM #
For reasons that I’ve never understood, geeky aggregators like Slashdot and Digg bring out the asshats in full force. Maybe it’s because we’re all emotionally repressed and can’t find normal outlets for our emotions, but nobody’s surlier or bitchier than your average Digg commenter.
— Darren on Sunday, January 07, 2007 at 07:38 PM #
Hah!
You know it took about 10 minutes longer to write that code than to just not care about the digg comments.
Funny, though.
— Phil on Sunday, January 07, 2007 at 08:38 PM #
In the ‘anti-digg’ 404 message the word Proprietor is spelled incorrectly.
— Tim on Monday, January 08, 2007 at 01:27 AM #
In my previous post, I meant to say 403 message! ;)
— Tim on Monday, January 08, 2007 at 01:28 AM #
I think our http://www.DiggSoundboard.com is for you Ryan :)
— Philipp Lenssen on Monday, January 08, 2007 at 01:57 AM #
Heh, Digg is just a bunch of 14 year olds hiding behind their keyboards typing what ever they want because they know they can get away with it.
I very rarely read the comments over there. I strictly use Digg for finding new and interesting places on the web.
I have posted a couple of links on Digg. All have been pretty much attacked to death.
The few comments I have posted seemed to get positive diggs which is OK. I have had a few go negative.
There is one problem with Digg. If the majority of them get pissed about something. They are like angry bees, they will find out as much info about what they are pissed about, and do everything in their power to attack what they are mad about. If they find a phone number, they will call it until you feel you have to change your number. If they find your address, well, I don’t know what they would do then, but I wouldn’t want to find out. If you are running a domain and your private info is visible and diggers are pissed at you, well, I guess I would be worried.
They have proven that they will do just about anything when they are mad. There was a story a few years back about a guy trying to buy a camera from one of those online stores that like to add very expensive accessories to cameras that they are selling cheap. The store wouldn’t send the camera the guy was buying and so the story got posted on digg, The diggers got pissed at the store and started calling it non-stop, sending threatening letters, etc…
I really feel they are just too powerful for a group of 14 year olds. At least they act like 14 year olds.
Anyway, sorry to hear about your problems and hope that blocking Digg helps.
— Dave M. on Monday, January 08, 2007 at 04:17 AM #
This episode is merely a repeat of one I’ve seen at least a dozen times before on Digg:
Viewed through this lens, everything you observe about Digg makes perfect sense: if I’m submitting someone else’s blog post and want it to get Dugg, it’s in my own interest to view the thing through Digg-colored lenses and write the headline accordingly. Your blog post touched on at least half a dozen of Digg’s fetish topics: Apple, Apple hardware failures, Microsoft, web design, conspiracy theories, and Parallels Desktop.
In my opinion, Digg should allow submitters to specify whether they’re posting their own content or someone else’s.
— Andrew Dupont on Monday, January 08, 2007 at 04:19 AM #
omg this is sooooo fucking CLICHED
Whining about digg and then describing how to send 403 messages WITH RUBY ON RAILS
GO BACK TO DIGG YOU WHINEY WEB2.0 FAGGOT
— High Priest Bill Geroldsonsmithsford of Handcuffingford on Monday, January 08, 2007 at 04:20 AM #
Excellent! 403 Go away = Best response code ever.
You may also enjoy the humorous Metafilter in the ruins, but Kevin Guilfoile: http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/stories/metafilter_in_the_ruins.php
-Aaron
— Aaron on Monday, January 08, 2007 at 05:10 AM #
on behalf of Frankenstein, I say “fuck the angry mob”
— hibiscusroto on Monday, January 08, 2007 at 02:12 PM #
I felt that Digg’s recent attack on James Kim was a truly frightening read. I know it doesn’t bear too much relation to what this post is about, but the mentality seems to be reflected pretty much across the board. This was it at its most vehement.
My name links to my comments about it.
— Rory Sullivan on Monday, January 08, 2007 at 05:13 PM #
Who can help me with .httpaccess ? where i can fined full information about .httpaccess file syntaxis?
— JackyMooll on Monday, February 05, 2007 at 09:58 PM #
Digg is nothing more than a bunch of juvenile thinking ass clowns in desperate need of peer approval. Who should really give a rat’s ass in a flying donut what a bunch of whining jerks think? The way their pyschotic “gangs' decide to run people off speaks volumes about their emotional instability. In other words..screw them! I joined Digg just for the comedy of laughing at their insane rants!
— WykdWife on Friday, February 23, 2007 at 11:22 AM #
Awesome! You just made my day. Like so many comments above, I agree Digg had its day and the community has destroyed what credibility it had. Glad to see others not bowing to the Digg god. Personally if I ever got to the frontpage of Digg I would block them to.
— LGR on Saturday, February 24, 2007 at 03:39 AM #
Interesting. I subscribe to some of the topic-specific feeds on Digg as a way to find articles, but I never bother to read the comments — they’re just pointless.
BTW, I followed a link here from the programming subreddit. I never read the main reddit site, but the programming site has some of the best signal-to-noise I’ve ever encountered.
— AN on Thursday, March 01, 2007 at 05:09 PM #
Digg.com is getting cocky and banning small web sites just because digg’s users submit them to digg and digg’s moderators don’t like it. Scifidigg.com is the latest victim of Digg’s “We are big, you are small and we can do whatever we want” attitude. First some background. After running the website Scifi2u.com for the last year we realised there was a demand for a scifi digg type website – 6 Days ago ScifiDigg.com was born and is powered by open source Pligg and the YouTube API. So what went wrong? The site went live on the 22 March 2007. People submitted stories and video links to digg and other sites del.icio.us, Yahoo, Simply and Reddit. Having a submit button makes submitting very easy and fast but that could be a problem. Let’s get to the point WITHIN 6 DAYS THE SITE HAS BEEN BANNED FROM DIGG Digg’s moderators decided that since the link pointed to my site and the posts are mainly videos from YouTube ScifiDigg should be banned from digg and no other links from scifidigg.com can be posted to digg. Digg’s response I contacted digg to find out what happened and why they blocked my site. The response I got from them was that my site violated their terms of use, by copying another site. I explained to them that although the video is streamed by YouTube we give the facility for original coments to be added. The response I got was that they do not allow sites that copy other sites to be submitted to digg. I told them that according to their rules they should also ban Yahoo news, since it does not have an original content but republish articles from PCWorld, Reuters, MACWorld and others. Also falls under this category other major sites like neowin.net, blink.nu and many more that are doing exactly the same infact they should ban YouTube because the video content is often copied from other video websites. But hey, they are big sites and digg can’t pick on them without repercussion, like they can pick on small blogs that try to establish themselves. So what have we learned? · Digg’s users don’t really determine what gets promoted, but digg’s moderators do. · Digg have a different set of rules for small site and different rules for big sites, even though both are doing the same. · Digg will ban a small site just because one of its user’s submitted an article that other digg members liked and promoted, but moderator didn’t like the link. · Digg will not listen to reason when told that the site did not violate its TOS.
I am going to create a Digg.com clone for banned sites http://www.BannedDigg.com Watch this space!!!
— NEW SITE GETS BANNED FROM DIGG WITHIN 6 DAYS - Steve on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 10:45 AM #
I just wrote an article entitled ‘Reddit: “merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational”’ on what will probably one day become a blog. It contains the subhead, “Digg: I Know This is Hard to Imagine, But It’s Even Worse Than Reddit”, and so I thought this might be of interest. Ryan has probably already read it.
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2008-January/000878.html
Also, there are several comment spams above this.
— Kragen Sitaker on Saturday, January 26, 2008 at 02:51 AM #