This is not a ‘conspiracy theory.’ This is about how Digg is not what it claims to be. Kevin Rose and the rest are not conspiring against ForeverGeek – they are simply using the system in a fashion exactly opposite to
what they claim (a non editorial website).

There are three separate issues that need to noted:

1. – Digg Army (promotion of stories that should not have been promoted, and also on how Kevin Rose was in the middle of the automated digging).

2. – The censorship of Digg (going against its original idea). This is backed by Andreas Climent and Splasho.

3. – The ‘aftermath’ burial of ForeverGeek (once we got unbanned).

So I just read Kevin’s reply. His explanation for the three points:

1. – That he ‘accidentally’ got involved. Yet somehow he was right in the middle of some of the automated Diggers. Somehow bribera and Kevin Rose were the only ones to get a digg in-between the automated Digging. bribera of course only managed once, yet Kevin got perfectly in the middle twice. I see Kevin has some good twitch clicking abilities.

2. – ForeverGeek was banned because of several accounts created artificially. So lets see who posts at ForeverGeek and also has a Digg account (please note you can also see the ‘days ago’ number to see that these people did not just get involved with Digg to ‘hide’ their tracks):

  • David (Phoenixd) – his latest Diggs are on this, but the ones before? Seems to be a lot of random stuff. Canadian focused
  • J Angelo – a recent joinee, he is a Pro Blogger and helps contribute to ForeverGeek. He has dugg over 1400 articles
  • Jumpbug (me) – yes I submit FG. But its my site, and lots of other users do that. Still, a lot of Diggs totally unrelated to ForeverGeek
  • Snipehack – this one may get me in trouble. This guy has an overall ranking of #5. If we were going to abuse Digg, wouldn’t we be using him to submit FG stories?
  • Griffith – 8 diggs, 3 for FG. Definitely systematic abuse [/sarcasm]

Also be sure to note that ForeverGeek
has hit the front page 7 times. Of those 7 times, only two were submitted by me.

3. – Explained with what Missing Stories is. That’s nice, but doesn’t explain why every single article posted to Digg about the abuse was instantly buried. I mean heck, look the link I dropped for #3 – 1000+ Diggs, 200+ comments, and yet it was buried within the first 30 Diggs (along with other similar articles, such as one that was linking to BoingBoing’s take on this and other mentions).

So really, Kevin’s response is more of a non-response. One of those PR-driven “say something but don’t really say anything.” He doesn’t explain how he got in the middle of the automated digging (and no one else did). He claims we were abusing the system, when you can see our accounts were legitimate users of Digg and that other people were submitting FG (and digging it). Lastly, he claimed that stories got legitimately buried – yet somehow every single Digg corruption story got buried almost immediately. About as fast as the user accounts had been getting banned before the story broke out (which also was not explained).

So – can we have a real response now?

UPDATE – And one more thing…..if ForeverGeek.com was spamming, why did it get unbanned?

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Related posts:

FG-DIGG Issue on TWiT
Kevin Rose Goes for Third Startup
Digg Army: Right in Line
The Digg Effect
Web 2.0 Review: Digg

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