A few hours ago I launched this blog.
I wanted to launch it with a nice Digg experiment, so I wrote Let’s Crash My Server and submitted it to Digg. Visitors started to came, I received about 30 visits in a few minutes… but suddenly visitors stopped.

Why?

Because someone buried my story.
I don’t know who, I don’t know why, what I know is that somehow, someone and for an unknown reason buried my story. My article is not that bad. I assure you it is better than a lot of articles that gets 15 diggs. But this is another story.

What I’m asking myself is:

I wanted to discover who buried my story, but this is not possible. So I started thinking.
And I found something interesting: this can easily be abused.
Suppose I am a Microsoft fan (far from true, but this is an example…).

I can easily start to bury stories that says that Vista is shit.

Now, suppose I have a dozen friends that do the same: we can really bias the news burying anti-microsoft stories… and no one will never know it, because there’s no way to discover who buried what!

In the digg user profile anybody can see what stories the user liked most. It would be easy to add the buried one, too, and people will no longer be able to cheat, and to bury stories not for the quality of the story itself, but for what the story says.