I’ve been in contact with Digg quite a few times today and we were finally able to get our domain unbanned! We have also added a “Digg” button in the bookmarks bar located underneath a post’s title to make submitting an article a little easier for you.
CyberNet was banned from Digg ever since October of 2006. Up until that point, Digg was one way that we were able to get our name and content out there, and many of our readers discovered our site from some of our front page articles. The ban came as a surprise when it happened, but it was a result of our visitors submitting nearly every article that we posted. While it was flattering to us, many Digg users viewed it as spam which eventually led to our domain being banned.
If you can think of any articles over the past several months that may still be interesting to Digg users, please feel free to submit them. If you intend on submitting CyberNet articles to Digg, please be selective and don’t go over-board so that we can prevent this from happening again 
So the digg team said it was because almost all of your posts ended up being submitted to digg? That seems odd at best, as you constantly see prominent blogs like thinkprogress.org being submitted far quicker and more often that sites like yours…and it’s justification for it being blocked, regardless if some users considered it spam, from the number of diggs your digg submissions got, I’d say there was a much larger majority that enjoyed your articles than considered them spam. As I don’t recall many if any being buried that I can think of. And if they were considered spam, diggers would have likely religiously buried them before they could be promoted, like they do with so many other sites they hate much more.
Digg’s at a point right now where they have pointed out in public comments that they are clearly far more focused on business aspects of things like monetization to the point of profitability, and scaling the site to the demand. They have only a few actual developers on their team of roughly 15, that it makes it very difficult for them to actually develop the necessary tools to improve the site, such as web crawlers to compare sites content for dupe detection, or dupe consolidation, and other such very necessary solutions to overwhelming problems on digg.
The quality has dropped so much now, b/c it is crossing the chasm, becoming mainstream…that it looks sadly similar to sites like [fark.com] in the kind of content that is promoted on the homepage. I’ve basically stopped contributing to the site…b/c people on digg no longer appreciate quality content, and won’t digg anything if it is longer than a couple short paragraphs, as diggers are young, ignorant and don’t like to read. It’s sad as I really loved digg for so long, and now my primary use for the site is to watch/listen to podcasts in one centralized location (sadly podcasting section maintains the highest quality of any category b/c it has the least user moderation, as it doesn’t take the normal promotion system, of digging up each new content produced, and rather is a more subscription based system…where you choose what sites content you want to see).
I suppose that may be why digg is seeing a downward trend for the first time really in alexa’s traffic monitoring.
Your chances of getting on the homepage will be next to nil Ryan, even if you write the best post in the blogosphere or post proof that aliens exist. All the sites that have been unbanned are being kept off the homepage and any posts submitted are buried within minutes. I’ve spoken to other sites that had their bans ‘lifted’ and they’ve all confirmed the same.
Good write-up and analysis here – [901am.com]
They didn’t come right out and say that it was because all of our articles were being submitted, but that’s what they implied. They said it was because too many of our articles were being marked as spam which constituted (according to them) the banning of our domain.
It is apparent that they are focusing on monetizing the most out of anything else. I see a lot of that happening with blogs that get big (like TechCrunch) who seem to lose focus on their readers. Michael used to respond to comments much more than he does now, and it’s like he just expects the community to continue to grow itself. I think he set a goal for himself, and once he reached it he forgot to set another goal to keep him motivated. The same goes for Digg…they used to seem more open-minded with what users were saying, but now they ask themselves “what would be best for us.”
I never really used Fark too much, but that is because the content was never that appealing. It always seemed like the Technology section was cluttered with things that were not pertinent to technology which detracted from its value. Digg is kinda the same way right now, but at least some of the big stories seem to make it to the front page still, whereas I never see some of the things I would expect to in Fark’s technology section.
I did see that and it was a little discouraging, but we haven’t had Digg traffic for several months and we have managed to grow just fine. With that being said if we don’t get that traffic we won’t be discouraged, but if we do get it then we’ll look at it as beneficial.
Groovy. WordPress has now allowed us to add Digg to our blogs so I am going through some of my popular articles and getting them submitted.
Finally the Digg team did something good! I didn’t see why you guys were banned in the first place as you have very good credible tech news.
I’ve got you on my friends list so I’ll be keeping an eye out for your submissions!
I think it is because some Digg users just see any blog as spam. Even if we do write credible news since we are a blog not everyone will see us as reliable.
It will be interesting to see how much additional traffic this will generate to your site, but as you mention you’ve done pretty well without it for the last few months. I think Digg is overrated and I agree with the points curtisthompson raised. I think there are better sites out there for sharing web content. I particularly like StumbleUpon, that generates far more traffic to my site than Digg ever did.
I love StumbleUpon just for my personal use for finding cool stuf. We get traffic from there quite often which always helps. I’d use StumbleUpon any day over Digg though.
My congratulations!