Digg, Dug, Buried: How Linux news disappears

I must agree with many of the comments on Digg and the SJVN article, Digg would be improved by not having "Bury" as an option.

A secondary would be to track bury the same way that digg is tracked, a quantity and "who buried".

Personally, I'm fascinated by who would bury Linux stories and several other subjects that I've noticed get coordinated bury efforts.

Yep. I have no idea what Digg gains by supporting organized troll gangs who bury certain stories, unless there is some behind-the-scenes money. There are many ways for users to filter out the noise, like Digg's own Recommendation Engine and numbers of Diggs for two examples. I've seen plain old ordinary, non-flamey stories I've posted on Digg get buried and attacked all to heck in the comments; anything that is negative towards Microsoft or Ubuntu gets creamed.

You're suggesting some sort of connection between microsoft and canonical? I'm confused.

No, he means that negative things get creamed.

No herzeleid, that's just what happens. I suspect money behind the Microsoft troll brigades, and my guess is that Ubuntu fanpersons are just plain thin-skinned :). Stories that are negative towards Ubuntu don't get buried with the passion and predictability of uncomplimentary MS stories, but it does happen.

This is why I like sites like fsdaily, they show who voted up and down on a post.. Ill use one of my recent post as a example.

http://www.fsdaily.com/EndUser/Bordeaux_1_8_for_FreeBSD_Rele...

As you can see three up votes, 2 down votes, this doesn't keep people from making up a handle, aka, alias and then troll voting. But at least it shows who the user is, and a IP for the user could be obtained by the system.

I'm not in any way saying the two down votes my post got were troll votes, the Bordeaux GUI isn't open source and some people don't like this... It's just hard paying the bills giving everything away :)

Cheers,

Tom

I remember naively posting comments on Digg stories. I did that something like five times. In one particular case, there was a story (far from unique) about an internet provider limiting bandwidth. All the comments were outrage over false advertising, so I explained that "unlimited" usually means unlimited connection times, not unlimited bandwidth, and provided a link. Buried in a hurry with a ton of comments about my lack of understanding of the English language/law/parts of my body.

The last time I posted a comment was on a story about the release of Vista's successor. I posted a link to comments made by Microsoft executives about the time frame, with a comment about how that seemed too long given the poor reception of Vista. Buried immediately.

Digg is largely useless as a source of news. At first it sounded like a good idea. Then I realized that an anonymous news filter is even worse than the filters we've already got.

So do you believe a link to Digg.com belongs on LXer?

(For any value of "you".)

Well, I think Digg has some value, as long as you ignore the comments over there. I often use it to find stories that I haven't seen anywhere else yet. I use the old, deprecated "upcoming" page instead of the new recommendation engine: http://digg.com/linux_unix/upcoming

> So do you believe a link to Digg.com belongs on LXer?

Isn't that up to the owner of LXer?

If your question were "deserves to be on LXer" or "is a good idea on LXer"....

> Then I realized that an anonymous news filter is even worse than the filters we've already got.

People are much more likely to act negatively when they are anonymous. It takes courage to voice an negative opinion when there's no question as to the identity of the speaker.

Quoting:Isn't that up to the owner of LXer?

Depends. We had 'Digg this story' links in the past (When Don C. Parris still wass EiC) you might remember, but Digg was angry at 'us' because they saw us LXer'ers as an organized Digg-brigade doing shameless self-promotion and ditched our stories instead of Digging them. We disagreed (IIRC) because they provide the 'Digg this' icons themselves, so what good is that if we may not use it? The main disagreement was about the person that wrote a story submitting to Digg themselves. When you used a different login at Digg than at LXer and a different IP that would not have been a problem, but doing it 'out in the open' was a problem to them. Of course, as an "open source" newssite, doing this in a secret way was no solution.

Then we stopped providing Digg-links with our stories.

It's funny, they could track 'us' because the links to 'Digg' were coming from LXer (hrefs), I think. But if we had made a 'secret obfuscated' Digg brigade they probably would not have acted against us.

So the policy seems a bit flawed: Digg brigades are forbidden, but if Digg can make it plausible the brigade was 'obfuscated' they don't act against them. Just my two €0,01 though.

"I must agree with many of the comments on Digg and the SJVN article, Digg would be improved by not having "Bury" as an option."

I could live with 'bury' as an option. What I find annoying about it is that there's no access what-so-ever to the 'Bury' data. How many 'burys' does it take to bury a story? Who's burying them? We don't know, and, as it is, we never will.

Steven

@sjvn

I've noticed in the past, not recently because I've given up on Digg, but in the past year anyway, that you've been successful in getting your posts on Digg. Until this article, I didn't even know there was a "bury" option.

As it is, I never really understood how any given article gets enough critical mass to really start getting Dugg (or is it Digged?).

The fact that at first glance the way Digg actually works was and is so mysterious led me to pretty much ignore it.

Seriously. I call for outing the IP addresses of trolls. Well, maybe not. That would eliminate anonymous comments, which probably have a little value, sometimes.

How about counts per netblock: do a "whois" on the IP address of each commentor, and put a table under each article with counts per netblock. That would keep the Wagg-Ed and MSFT protrolls on their toes, keep them switching service providers, etc etc, to avoid tipping their hands.

Naturally, you'd want to do this for every article, but it would only be of interest for the controlversial/pro-linux/anti-windows articles.