Some members of the social news site Digg have reported that their accounts were banned claiming that the users were digging or burying stories without actually reading them.

Now, this is beyond my comprehension as there are a less number of users who only Digg or bury a story once they completely go through it.

Digg bans such accounts and the reason they state for this is:

Your account was banned for the rate of digging activity you’ve engaged in. We’ve determined that the time in which your Diggs happen, it isn’t possible to actually read the stories. Please read each and every story before you Digg or bury a story. Once you agree that you will Digg/bury more responsibly and read the stories, we will unban your account.

Please read, please read, it’s a democracy!

Regular users of digg would agree that members seldom read seriously and, most often, vote a story if it already has a huge number of digs against it. Users think that the story has already been read by a number of people and most of the time first vote and then go on reading. But what if majority of the people who have dugg the story have also thought the same...?

Some also feel that Digg wants people to first read the story and then Digg it because they want people to come back to their site again to Digg the story as a ploy to increase their traffic, but still I don’t feel the same because Digg is already getting huge traffic and the site cannot ban users just to add to that growing number.

How does Digg determine that the user is digging without reading?

All of you who use Digg must have seen that you cannot send many friend requests at the same time. The reason can be an algorithm used that tracks the time interval between two subsequent friend requests and if the time interval is short then the algorithm generates a message informing the user that he/she is generating multiple requests in a short interval of time. The same can be the case here, an algorithm can be used to track the time a user takes between two subsequent diggs and if the time is too small for a person to read an article then it can determine that the users is just digging or burying an article without going through it.

What else could have been done?

Here, another question arises that suppose a member has already read that story somewhere else and while browsing through Digg he comes across the story and diggs it, then also the algorithm will catch it and might ban him, which would be absolutely discouraging for the member.

I personally feel that banning users altogether is a bit harsh and Digg should try to temporarily disable the user from Digging just like they do in case a person is sending multiple friend requests at the same time. That would warn users to go through the article before casting their vote on it.

Image: Howstuffworks

Via: Valleywag