Digg Blocked For "Bandwidth Theft"
It's hard to find anybody to agree with the logic, and certainly the only people that appear to be writing about it have done so to heap ridicule and scorn, but (apparently) the same person to bring us WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com has now introduced WhyDiggIsBlocked.com.
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg has spent 2007 fending off criticism from inside its own ecosystem: in March the company published its own defense of its bury and block mechanics after users accused it of censorship, and by May outside observers were arguing internal burying was suppressing stories outright. Against that backdrop, an anonymous provocateur known for WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com has launched WhyDiggIsBlocked.com, framing Digg itself as a 'bandwidth thief.'
The framing has landed badly — commentary on the day is almost uniformly ridicule, and ReadWriteWeb's same-day takedown of the economics of blocking social media traffic argues the premise backwards: Digg sends traffic to publishers rather than taking it. The episode matters less as a serious grievance than as another flashpoint in the long-running question, dating back at least to the 2006 traffic-versus-influence debate with Slashdot, of what Digg's referrals are actually worth to the sites that receive them.
First-order effects
- Digg absorbs another round of negative attention over how its traffic affects publishers, this time from a satirical single-issue site rather than a disgruntled user base.
- The anonymous creator behind WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com gets a second wave of attention by recycling the same provocation formula against a new target.
Second-order effects
- Publishers already weighing whether Digg's traffic spikes justify their server bills get a fresh prompt to audit referral economics — even though the 'bandwidth theft' framing is being rejected by most commenters.
- Rival aggregators can position themselves as friendlier to publishers, since any controversy over Digg's costs-and-benefits tradeoff invites comparison with alternatives like Slashdot.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social news sites face a structural accountability question: their value proposition depends on sending traffic publishers consider worth hosting, and repeated disputes over burying, blocking, and bandwidth keep forcing that bargain into the open.
- Provocation-as-commentary sites targeting platforms may become a recurring genre, giving platform critics a low-cost way to force issues onto the tech press agenda without institutional backing.
The trend: Social news aggregators are moving from being celebrated traffic firehoses to contested economic actors whose costs to publishers are debated as openly as their reach.