Digg is Censoring Content by Burying Stories Internally
We all know that the main reason why stories don't hit the Digg homepage is because they get buried. Some say the buries are caused by specific Digg users who have it out for us while others just blame it on the content saying it wasn't Digg worthy.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands two weeks after the '09 F9' revolt, when Digg tried to take down posts carrying the HD DVD processing key and the community flooded the site with copies until the founder publicly conceded and described an 'insane day'. That episode already strained the site's founding pitch — the founder had insisted just days earlier that digging and burying power always belonged to the community.
The new allegation cuts deeper than the December 2006 rigging accusations or Digg's own March 2007 explainer on buries and blocking, because it claims the buries come from inside the company rather than from top users or cliques — a charge Marketing Pilgrim amplified the same day under a 'censorship continues' banner.
First-order effects
- Submitters and publishers relying on Digg for homepage traffic now face an invisible gatekeeping layer they cannot see or appeal to, on top of the user-bury mechanics Digg has documented.
- Digg's own framing — that moderation belongs to the community — is directly contradicted by the confirmed internal-burying claim, putting the founder's May 2 statement at odds with company practice.
Second-order effects
- Rival social-news sites can compete on transparency of moderation, turning Digg's opacity into a recruiting pitch for the same power users whose digging and friending behavior drove traffic patterns since at least the September 2006 friends feature.
- Advertisers buying homepage placement are paying for a queue whose composition is partly decided by staff judgment rather than pure vote count, complicating what a front-page slot is actually worth.
Third-order effects
- If internal buries persist alongside legal takedown pressure like the DMCA fight over the encryption key, Digg drifts from crowd-ranked aggregator toward an editorially filtered publisher wearing a democratic label — the exact 'downfall' dynamic critics flagged as far back as August 2006.
- The pattern is an early instance of platform gatekeeper leverage: whoever controls the ranking layer holds power no amount of community voting can override, a tension every subsequent user-generated feed inherits.
The trend: User-voted news platforms are discovering that community moderation and centralized control cannot coexist indefinitely, with each censorship controversy forcing the balance further toward the operator.