Cameron Olthuis

After some great detective work, Neil broke the story this morning that Digg is censoring content internally by burying stories before they reach the homepage.

You probably think users buried the story, but it actually was one of the Digg employees who buried it or an algorithm that is targeting specific content topics/sites. If you don’t believe me, here is a document that contains 10,000 buries from that day and none of them seem to be buries for the “I’m in like with You” story

I’ve suspected that Digg has been censoring content internally now for quite some time. I’ve seen many great stories get buried just before reaching the homepage with no evidence of the community burying them. The problem is that I’ve never had proof before.

When this issue has been raised in the past Digg claims the reason is that Digg Spy doesn’t show all activity, only a small sample. Well, now there is proof with this URL that shows the last 10,000 buries on the site. If you have a submission that has been buried and you check that URL and see no buries then chances are you’ve been censored by Digg.

So why is this a big deal? Well because the Digg model is supposedly based on a non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. Meaning the community is supposed to dictate what does and doesn’t reach the homepage, not Digg itself.

Is this more evidence that Digg has jumped the shark?