The story that never seems to die has reared its head again. Digg dropped a story that was actually getting diggs. The writer has a file that contains thousands of “buries” for the day and none of them are for the story that disappeared.

Now you may think that this makes me angry. Honestly, it doesn’t. I don’t really care one way or the other.

I think, however, that Threadwatch summarizes why I hate digg…

If Digg wants to employ moderators to editorially guide the stories on their site that’s all well and good and within their rights as owners of the site. However what they need is the same level of transparency for ‘bury votes’ as they have for Digg votes, and they need to take accountability for those decisions instead of blaming it on their users.

I’d take that a step further.

Either they need to turn the keys over to the users, or stop calling it a user submitted social news site. It isn’t. In my not-so-humble-opinion, it’s either all or nothing. You can’t call yourself a “democracy” and then exercise control over it.

It’s fine that they stop spammers, porn, illegal stuff, etc., but it’s time they stopped worrying about someone gaming the system and started acting at least somewhat transparently.

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