Slashdot Mirror
Growing Censorship Concerns at Digg
I find site rivalries boring, but growing concerns over Digg "censorship" have been submitted steadily for the last few months. Today two such stories were submitted so numerous that I had little choice but to post. The first claims that Digg is
the editor's playground- it explains how a few users control Digg, and that it's not really the 'Democracy' that they claim it to be. Personally I think this is all totally within the rights of their editors to choose content however they like. But it's less pleasant when combined with accounts getting banned for posting content critical of digg, and watching other content getting
removed for being critical of sponsors (also, here is Kevin Rose's reply).
Aye. My account was banned years ago from moderation for moderating up a post on slashdot critical of slashdot policies.
The same happened to others.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Two front page articles got pulled off within 10 minutes of being promoted.
Users can easily create email accounts, change their IP address by resetting their router/modem and create accounts in digg to eventually digg their articles.
Non-moderated news never works. Digg _is_ moderated. The poor soles who frequent that site just don't know it. As TFA said, digg.com is more of an editor playground that a democratic proccess of picking news.
here are two examples from yesterday
Example 1 Example 2Each website has its own specific qualities that make it good and bad. For instance, I like Digg because it is updated more frequently than Slashdot (see diggvsdot), but apparently "these updates" maybe too frequent (i.e. stories deleted). I think Slashdot has better comments. I cannot stand Digg comments. Digg comments are the same type of comments that Fark has... people talking about stuff they have no clue of. At least with Slashdot, most of the comments are made by informed people.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
Add another Slashdot victom here. I used to get mod points weekly. After I complained about Michael (and got a post of mine instantly modded from +3 down to -1), I haven't seen them since.
Overall, I find it odd that CmdrTaco complains about Digg censorship, when Slashdot itself has its own glaring examples. For example, check out this thread where every single comment was modded down to -1. Even worse, once when a thread was knocked down to -1, those who mod up anything, *anything* in that thread no longer get mod points.
All this hue and cry of censorship seems to be simply because people don't understand the system.
A story reaches the front page by people "digging" that story. The total number of "diggs" is listed on the page.
However, a story can be yanked from the front page by people who mark it as lame or inaccurate or spam, or whatever. These numbers are NOT listed.
So when a story is yanked back off, there is no visibility as to WHY it was yanked off the front page. Lots of people seem to think that the admins do it themselves, when in fact it's some algorithim taking it off because enough people marked it down.
If they made this information visible, then there'd be less complaining. Instead of having several options like lame and so forth, they should have a simple button marked "Bury" to allow people to say that the story is stupid (or whatever they feel). Put a counter next to the bury link, to show how many people don't like it. Then when a story is autoyanked from the front page, there will be visibility. People won't have room to complain, because the story clearly got buried from people marking it down.
The REAL reason people are complaining is because of a poor user interface, not censorship.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Yup.
Digg.com: Rank 1150.
slashdot.org: Rank 62.
May the Maths Be with you!