As you may know, digg recently unbanned a lot of domains, and www.mapelli.info was amongst them.

They claimed they have improved their algorithm to easily detect spammy content, and that there’s no need to ban domains now.

What I think is that digg automatically sets the buried flag for “untrusted” domains.

Here’s some evidence of this theory, and a brief explanation:

Some days ago, John Chow reported that each of his recent stories have been buried… if you try to search digg for johnchow.com stories in the last 30 days you get only one result… but if you try the search including the buried stories you get 21 results. I thought it was just him hated by the digg community, but I found out he’s not the only one with all recent stories from his blog buried.

The same (on a smaller scale) happens to me: no stories with a normal search and 4 results if you include the buried stories.

Just a coincidence? Maybe.

But what about

Something like 95% of the articles from this domains are buried! That’s not a standard behavior!

So I started an experiment, and submitted my 3 reasons why alexa sucks story to digg. After a few minutes and a total of 7 visits my story had 3 diggs (my own and two others…a good start!) and was still not buried.

A couple of hours later, the story was buried, but I received no visits from digg… how can it be that my article was buried without being visited? I think this is the new algorithm at work, not the users who blindly buried my story!

Only one possible explanation came to my mind:

The new Digg algorithm automatically buries a story from an untrusted domain if the story does not receive a large number of diggs in the first few minutes

… is a sort of bias against the untrusted domains… something like guilty unless proven innocent,

This, if confirmed, really pisses me off… what is the purpose of unbanning sites if you’re going to bury their stories?

Please, since this is still a theory let me know what you think about it and if you too have proofs of this behavior.

(The sad thing is that if I’m right, even if I submit this article on digg, noone but the first few readers will notice it unless I get hundreds of diggs)

Update: this story has been submitted to digg but - guess what - it has been buried even if it was being dugg. Auto-bury?

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