Massive Digg Ban For Using GreaseMonkey Scripts. I Urge You To Avoid All Digg Scripts.

Digg.com is probably one of the most powerful sites that can make your blog a powerhouse.  I’ve seen Digg take some of the blogs that I compete directly with to an astonishing Alexa rank, a high number of RSS subscribers, and unbelievable amounts of traffic.  As people gain power on Digg, they let it influence them to do things they shouldn’t.  MrBabyMan, MSaleem, Zaibatsu, MakiMaki, SuperNova17, Digitalgopher, MKLopez, Cliffosakajapan, skored, and Albertpacino are the top 10 Digg users and have the power to dominate a lot of the homepage real estate on Digg.com.

Other Digg users weren’t happy with a group of people retaining all this power so they invented easy Digging scripts for people to use.  These scripts allowed Digg users to do things that Digg management didn’t want them to be able to do.  Such as checking to see which of your friends are Digging your stories.  Another script would even automatically Digg stories for you while you were sleeping.  One more Digg script placed a Digg It button in the Incoming shouts page, a place that Digg intended not to have a button placed.

Jen Burton, Community Manager at Digg wrote a blog post stating that using scripts results in a violation of the Digg Terms of Use and will result in a ban.  I’ve used Digg for about two years now and have achieved about a 6% popular rate.  About 18 of the 300 stories I’ve submitted to Digg was homepaged.  I’ve tried the scripts a couple of times, but when I found out that they violate TOS, I uninstalled them immediately.

From one active Digg user to other active Digg users, I urge you to uninstall any scripts you have that modifies the way that Digg operates otherwise you will be banned.  Over 80 accounts have been deleted overnight.  You can find the list of them at the GetSmartBlog.  One of the notable bans that were made for using scripts is Brian Cuban, the brother of Internet billionaire Mark Cuban.  Surprisingly, none of the top 10 was banned.  But when Mr. Baby Man was interviewed recently, he denied using scripts or even from knowing what scripts were on his live video podcast. 

One of the most interesting parts of Mr. Baby Man’s discussion about whether he uses scripts was when he was asked what he would have Kevin Rose change about the company.  He replied make it more open and transparent– allow users to see what is going on.  Owen Byrne, co-founder of Digg agreed with Mr. Baby Man and stated:

“Open up the site, open up transparency, let people see what’s going
on…” How true that is, and I can guarantee you that you won’t see it
until Jay and Kevin are gone. I should know, as they did a masterful
job of suppressing my role as co-founder.