Just what is Blog Spam? Why are Digg users so irate?

This is a direct quote from a Digg comment on a story submitted by Kevin Rose, the creator of Digg, to his personal blog about Digg:

Why is it that when Kevin Rose diggs his own blog, it comes to the top, but if I do it, I am dugg down!???
Rules are rules…buried as spam..

Having just had the Digg Gods (Top Users) come down on me hard for submitting my apparently useless opinion on a subject on my personal blog, I decided to take an adventure to just see where these Digg rules exist. I was under the impression that the purpose of Digg was to propagate interesting content around the web, and let the democracy of Digg’s users promote or unpromote stories as they see fit.

I get tired of reading the comments on Dugg stories lambasting the submitting user because this one particular user doesn’t find that story relevant to him and decides that since it is not relevant to him, then it must be buried and destroyed at all costs including personally insulting the submitter.

Now it’s gotten to the point that the man who created Digg himself is getting buried and reported as spam when he submits something he posted to the site. Is it not newsworthy.

It would seem to me that the users doing this stuff have completely missed the

Digg Terms of Service and are just creating a community of people who live to react like angry teenagers when someone submits something that they don’t think is cool enough. If you don’t like a story, bury it by all means, that’s how it is supposed to work, but the things that are ruining Digg are the people that do the following:

• Comment on articles they aren’t interested in by verbally assaulting the submitter
• Fanboys that blanket bury anything that promotes an alternative to their passion
• Digg farms that automatically Digg friend content regardless of quality

Let’s face it. Blogs are a part of the Internet landscape and people are finding good quality content on them. Now that doesn’t mean that everything submitted to Digg is going to be front page material, that’s kind of the point. But it’s not your personal duty to do anything other than bury it if you think it is inaccurate or inappropriate…not bury it because it’s about Windows and you like Mac.

According to Digg’s “How it works” section, your duty is to

• Digg. Participate in the collaborative editorial process by Digging the stuff that you like best. As you Digg, you contribute to the count on any given item. You also build a profile of Diggs that your friends can view.
• Bury. If you find stories with bad links, off-topic content, or duplicate entries, click “Bury.” That’s how we get the spam out of the system.

See that? Off Topic content, duplicate entries….spam. Blog and Spam are not synonymous. There is blog spam, and it should be eradicated. But if someone prepares a well written article about his or her impressions of a particular product or service, that doesn’t make it spam.

In principle I am not going to Digg this story myself. I will let the obviously not quite democratic Digg society decide if it’s newsworthy or not. But let’s be clear, this is in no way spam. I am not making you read it, I am not soliciting a product you don’t want, and I am not bashing anyone or saying anything inaccurate, non-topical or inappropriate. That is what Digg is all about. Are you a digger or a hater?

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