Digg, The new bully on the block

Since when did the new kid on the block became the new bully on the block? Right about August 17th.. when the bully decided to shut down a small little site call DiggGames.com. Well, I felt bad for DiggGames.com, and its too bad that the bully had to push it weight around and squash little small innovation and creative effort to make the web better and friendly for the rest. Buzzshout has something to say there.. We still don’t see how they could have threaten the almighty “snob”

Ciao Digggames.com! Thanks for all the fish, and Good Luck!…………..

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So Webreakdigg is not alone.

Looks like breaking digg is on track and more are jumping on the bandwagon. An interesting read : How Digg was Sabotaged. So how possible is it to game digg? That very question has always been on Kevin’s mind. Can a group of people form a mailing list and through that mailing list, they dictate what they all digg. And of course, if there are say 100 people on the list and 80% of them did exactly what they had to do, digg the story that they had agreed on, there you go … you have front page exposure.

Well, Kevin have of course thought about that since the first day he had Digg floating in his mind, and what is his solution? The Digg front page algorithm ( no thesis required ). Digg’s front page algorithm is heavily based on submitter’s karma. What the hell is submitter’s karma? Basically, how popular the submitter is plays a part. So if this user just submits stories and not digg other stories, that count towards his karma. Bad karma. But this itself totally breaks digg, which is why 80% of the front page stories are top 5% users’ submitted stories. And the best part, Kevin has no clue on how to fix this, because fixing this would essentially break digg. But all is not lost, Webreakdigg has the answer to your pain, Kevin, but we have no plan to share it for now.

Diggy Whiny Users

Another reason why Digg is totally not up to its claim. A worthless rumor about Netscape trying to game Digg’s front page is getting some 3000 diggs from the loyal Digg users. Tell me how is this worth the read for the rest of the netizens.

Why Digg is broke

It is sad to see the “I’m totally vested, f**k off” attribute just because you’ve been there, done it in the “We are so friendly and welcome all” blogospere. There has been quite a bit of heat directed at Webreakdigg – namely from Digg Army – what I defined as Digg “idolisers”. They have absolute belief that Digg is great. Is that really what ALL Digg users believe. A simple query on technorati with “Digg top users” brings up blog entries talking ’bout:

– The Internet News Mafia
– What I like and don’t like about digg.com?
– Digg It – Social News & The Network Effect
– Digg is great, but it’s not perfect. Here are 3 ways Digg could be improved.
– Is Digg Censoring Reddit?
– Digg reddit

So yes, “Digg’s great” for certain fans, but not all.

The fact that Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s Home Page Content is a major contradiction of Digg’s original belief – “Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on Digg is submitted and voted on by the Digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that’s important to you!”. It should really be “Digg is all about our top users powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community but only the ones submitted by our top 100 users get on the Front page. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that’s important to you but sometimes we will bury stories linking to competitor sites or is negative towards Digg itself“

A pat on our back

What a day of blogging and rumbling and linking it was yesterday. Since the day Webreakdigg blog network launched, our traffic has been moving up in a steady healthy trend. Not to shabby for a 2 day old blog. We are now on the 19th position of BOTD (Best of the Day) on wordpress.com. Can we ever catch up to the almighty Scobleizer. But hey, we are still marching towards 200 strong, so why don’t you go ahead and fill up the Become A Webreakdigg Network Member application if you think you want to be part of a (pushing hard) up and coming element in the blogosphere? That’s provided you meet the requirements to become a member of Webreakdigg. (ps. its not that tough, trust me) . Sorry for the stain there. I was looking ahead to preping this pic to be a piece in history of the Webreakdigg museum.

Digg’s Amazing FrontPage Rank Algorithm (almost as good as Google’s Pagerank)

How Digg manage to serve up stories to the Front Page is still a mystery to most Digg users. And I think it has to do with this chunk of code that got leaked. (source unknown and unverfied). And since I am a Rails/Ruby guy, I will try to show their wonderful frontpage algorithm.

def getfrontpagenews

@stories = story.find_by_diggspecialprivilegedusers_and_
topusers_and_storyelapsedtime(yes,500,duncare)

end

So this story which is 19hrs old and has some 60 diggs got to the front of tech news? What is up with that? Wait a minute… Let’s check the user profile of the submitter … ohh…I got it.

Digg buries Webreakdigg

At the time of posting, Webreakdigg’s first virgin story on digg has been buried in the “You got banned” queue. Yes. The “Netscape bans “Digg”” story is missing somehow from Digg’s Tech Industry Upcoming Queue. So if you want to Digg it go directly to the story because it does not come out even using search.

Isn’t this against the motto of Digg? Why are they moderating stories? It’s an answer that we do not have. Was the story really that bad? Did our user nick violated the TOS or is it just as Netscape bans “Digg” , Digg bans “Webreakdigg”.

Worth a read here : http://paulgraham.infogami.com/blog/ about how another Digg user’s story got buried because of his link to reddit.

UPDATES:
As of now… whatever now is … The post has 97 diggs but is nowhere to be found in Digg’s queue… Help me out here, what am I missing?

This story is officially buried for no apparent reason. So Digg is afterall broke.

http://digg.com/search?area=all&age=7&sort=new&search-buried=1&s=netscape+bans+digg&submit=Search

The irony of it all is the Netscape bans “Digg” story is still in their RSS feeds.

Daily Words of Wisdom from the Webreakdigg Network

The Webreakdigg network comprises of bloggers that pride themselves in promoting better wisdom and knowledge to the blogosphere. And so we will have a daily post of “words of wisdom” on a daily basis from selected posts and members of the Webreakdigg network.
Evolving Trends
– Unwisdom of crowds
– For Great Justice, Take Off Every Digg

Obeattie
– Universal Selector
– Brick Wall

Netscape got hacked and then bans Digg while Digg bans users

The social news arena has been pretty chaotic this week. First off, Netscape got hacked by Digg army, and then Digg starts banning users citing they were in violation of the their TOS and drops story off the front page of Digg – working against their much publicised motto of “Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community.”

So as you know, we decided to checkout Netscape and then tried to registered an account with of course “Webreakdigg”. But wait a minute, that user name has been taken… Sh*t.. someone hijacked our beloved network motto and name. That’s not cool. But we tried some other combinations and found something really interesting…… Netscape actually bans user from having “digg” in their nicks. What a brunch of losers. Like that is gonna help. Ok .That sounded a little disparaging. I take that back.

Updates: Webreakdigg submitted this story to Digg and it looked like it was going to hit the front page of tech news but then all the sudden it got buried. With 100+ diggs now, the first virgin story from Webreakdigg is RIP. Thanks Digg for censoring us. Since when did they change their motto? I think possibly since 3.0./p>

Side note: Worth a read here Marc Fawzi – For Great Justice, Take Off Every Digg (A member of the Webreakdigg network)

But the Webreakdigg spirit lives – and so will our motto live on – without change – “WE ARE GOING TO BREAK DIGG”!

So Technorati is broke too

We were trying to search if anyone else in the Blogosphere started to pickup the Webreakdigg network and of course we expected nothing since we launched this morning at 2AM. But wait a minute, Technorati is broke even before anyone tries to break it.

It’s showing 7 results but only has 4 entries in the list.