A list of article burials on Digg, along with the users who buried them. One does note that one is seeing a very few users doing a lot of burying. See link above.

Not only allegations that a small group of hyperaggressive users (50 in total) are burying posts on Digg, but with a little unexplained hacking being alluded to, the members of that local cabal are allegedly named. The question this raises being how much faith we should put in strangers who don't explain their methods - but then, if they did, we wouldn't be allowed to link to this article, would we? The fact that a search turned up 16900 hits for "Digg" and "bury brigade" does make this a little easier to believe, though, and a little more of a source of worry for the Stumbleupon user when he hears a suggestion that Digg take over that other service.

Chris Crum (the author) writes about a rumored upcoming Digg toolbar incorporating random search, and asks if this is bad news for Stumbleupon, as that is the service's key feature. Perhaps, but Crum hasn't given us reason enough to think so. Randomness, by itself, isn't a big deal. Webrings had incorporated it into their code long before there was a Stumbleupon. Carefully weightened randomness is what Stumbleupon does. Stumbleupon offers a blogging platform, albeit a seriously flawed one. Digg does not. Those who submit content to Digg risk loss of membership if the content proves to be unpopular enough; so far as I know, Stumbleupon users don't have the same worry, outside of a little political whackiness in the fora. I'm left with the impression that Crum repeats somebody who has read too much into too little, having little familiarity with the capabilities of the SU system, and with the policy differences between the two sites.

Alex Laburu raises a serious point about Stumbleupon than that to be found in the bookmark above; that perverse incentives are built in to the system by SU's business model, in which the company makes money, not from visits to blogs on their system, but by getting paid for "stumbles" - random visits to sponsor websites taking place through their system. Under such a model, Laburu argues, a well written blog costs the company money, because it is a blog visitors are less likely to leave soon via a stumble - and those following its links aren't stumbling. He raises a good point (among others), one that should lead SU users to view with concern the supposedly good feature that is the absence of advertising on our blogs on SU, because it provides SU admins with a short term incentive to side with those misusing the system at the expense of those using it constructively. Which does leave us with the question of how Diigo is making its money, does it? One might ask if many of the users bring this sort of thing upon themselves - listen in on the screaming when the very possibility of introducing advertising is raised, on some sites, as if the hosting service didn't need to make money. Perhaps when the subject arises here - Diigo is still in Beta as I write this - some of us might want to speak in support of that very sensible source of revenue for a company we'd like to evolve in a healthier direction than that being taken by some of its competition, at the moment.

The article points us toward a reason why the business model alluded to in the link above (paid for stumbles) is ultimately unsustainable - those visiting bounce through without doing much more than briefly glancing at the pages they visit, very often. This is plausible. People get enthusiastic about their new toy, they get a rhythm going, and they don't want to stop.

A very brief testimonial from another blogger.

Bringing this down to the bottom line, yet another blogger shares his experience, of watching people bounce away without doing much of anything on his site. How much is traffic like that to a site, and how much will somebody be willing to pay to keep getting more of it? As the author says, "The problem is that when I stumble I am in the mood for some fast action. I don't want to be bothered with heavy reading and just want to be amused." a spirit that, as somebody in one of the sites bookmarked above argues, Stumbleupon's business model gives the company and its management a perverse short term incentive to encourage. But can one encourage impatience and then, moments later, hope that impatience will suddenly vanish the moment a visitor reaches a sponsor's site? Or does behavior, once reinforced, tend to linger? Does the company really expect those sponsors to not notice that their bottom line isn't being helped, just because they hope it will, and assume that it must?

Post about the data loss incident at Ma.gnolia and what users of other services can do to reduce their risk

Larry Halff of Ma.gnolia (where I and many other users were before we came to Diigo) is interviewed, following the collapse of that service, and explains what he did wrong, without evasion. Many of us wish him well, and hope that both he manages to rebuild his company after this regrettable incident.

See: "Bookmarks insist on being private, against my will" http://groups.diigo.com/Diigo_HQ/forum/topic/bookmarks-insist-on-being-private-against-my-will-48320 A number of users, myself included, have found their bookmarks being changed from public to private, keeping others from being able to see them, this change occuring without explanation or justification. We wrote to the forum about this problem, and Diigo did not respond until after the thread had been running for several months. This link and my comments on it (which follow) provide a good example of just how silly this has become. Who could possibly be offended by this: "This, regrettably, is no joke. An official barged in as the cyclist was making arrangements for his son's funeral. Somebody needs to be fired, not reprimanded or suspended." Being offended by the official's actions is reasonable. Being offended by somebody objecting to them is not.

Another post from my bookmark page that I find keeps getting censored on Diigo, by being switched from public to private over my objections. Once again, notice that there is no justification for this. No porn or other content unsuitable for general audiences appears on the page linked to, or in my comments about it, which follow: "Men in Black gone wild. Employees of a county department of Homeland Security decide to make their own laws about the viewing of porn." That's it. That's all that I had written.

One of the three bookmarks on my profile which the Diigo system has repeatedly changed from public to private, against my wishes. See: http://groups.diigo.com/Diigo_HQ/forum/topic/censorship-on-diigo-this-would-be-a-problem-48649

Comment: One of the three posts from my bookmark page that the Diigo system (or somebody at Diigo) keeps changing from public to private. See: http://groups.diigo.com/Diigo_HQ/forum/topic/censorship-on-diigo-this-would-be-a-problem-48649 As you can see, nothing in this post justified this sort of censorship. The post follows, verbatim: "Law that is good in principle, applied without the use of common sense or basic logic. One of the reasons why underaged teens aren't allowed to consent to model nude - without parental consent, and there are issues enough in that to justify a whole other post - is because children are believed to lack the mental capacity to fully understand the decisions that they are making. Yet now they are to prosecuted for making those very same decisions on their own, as if they were competent adults who had preyed on incompetent children, luring them into decisions their victims might later regret, leaving us with a pick and mix in which the teens are regarded as being both competent and incompetent at same time, the state they are to be viewed as being in depending on the needs of the argument under which they are to be imprisoned at each given point. Doublethink a la Orwell being used as a basis for Law, as the underaged are put in danger of sent to prison (where they are likely to be raped) using a law designed to protect them from a form of sexual exploitation."

Same problem as Mr.Hanneken, though not as acute - three of my bookmarks have, without my consent and without justification, been changed to private. I mentioned this elsewhere, on a thread that he linked to on August 11.

"The absence of a reply (in any topic, not this one in particular) should not be misinterpreted as wilful silence. "

For reasons I cite elsewhere, it does raise serious concerns. I'd like to think that we're looking at no more than one employee doing this without management's approval, but ... is there more than one employee?

Really, how much do we know about Diigo, or most other social networking sites for that matter? By the way - the first post in this discussion will soon be two months old, with no sign of a reply by Diigo's staff. I agree with Eric - they're probably not willing to respond.

Graham Perrin wrote:

> A typo. I meant Joel.
>
> Please keep personal insults out of the public area.

Graham, get off of it. If you're going to behave arrogantly, you're going to get called arrogant. That's life. Grow up and deal with it.

> > In other words

> In other words, respectfully: somewhere more suitable. This topic is suitable,
> and this topic is not hidden.

Case in point, and let's add "liar" to the list of noncomplimentary noninsults that you may receive. You didn't just call for this bookmark or that to be moved - you called for every bookmark that I had submitted to this group to be removed, most of which have nothing to do with this discussion. One which you very clearly entered with mind already made up, carrying the proverbial axe to grind.

Three bookmarks out of the massive pile already assembled will not shut anything down, and I think you know that. But they will beautifully illustrate the absurdity of the events that have occured, and that's really isn't something you want people to see, is it, Graham? Looking at the massive level of posting we've seen from you on this group, one that casts your complaint about my three little bookmarks (and their 14 unrelated little friends) in a truly absurd light, one might well ask if you have any life outside of Diigo at all, and indeed, much of a life outside of this group. The concept that people might look and see for themselves that there are signs that Diigo, indeed, did do wrong, really horrifies you, doesn't it?

So much so that you're willing to attempt to abuse the disciplinary process on a site in order to keep people from seeing what you don't want them to see. That's what is truly disgraceful, and whining about how I've "insulted" you won't make the disgrace go away. Doing so merely provides Diigo with a chance to disgrace itself by acting on your sordid request.

Let's see if they do.

Graham Perrin wrote:

> I'll respond to none of your points now or in the future.

Wave, wave, bye, bye - and good riddance.

I just edited an old post on a group, and noticed that Diigo has jumped onto the bandwagon and started adding rel=nofollow to all outbound links in its groups. Guys, please stop doing that.

The standard argument for using nofollow is that its use deters spammers, even if the rate of spammage would seem to have increased since the introduction of nofollow. This belief can easily be seen to be nonsense by anybody who has ever waited for one of his sites to appear in the search engines listings. Why? Because that process can take months, sometimes even years, and spam sites don't tend to live that long. Within weeks of a site being so promoted, sometimes even within days, complaints about the spam will have gone in to the service hosting the site and to the site's registrar by the truckload, and the site will be gone. Only to be replaced by a brand new site at a brand new location, selling the same old stuff, as anybody who, out of perverse curiosity, has ever clicked on a link on a semi-old spam message (and then checked his newer e-mail) almost certainly has seen for himself.

Spammers work by getting large numbers of visitors to go to throwaway sites that won't live long enough to rise in the search engine ratings, so pagerank won't matter to them. Logically, it shouldn't, and if we take a look at spammer behavior following the introduction of nofollow, we find no evidence whatsoever that it does. It can, however, matter immensely to those who are trying to establish a web presence for themselves honestly, by doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, that which the search engines are supposed to be encouraging them to do - by creating and posting content that people want to read and link to. Let's say that one of us posts content to a "black hole", a site that (like Diigo) has rel-nofollowed all outbound links, including the homepage links on our profiles. (Check it out - Diigo has done this). Let us say that somebody looks at the content, likes the content, and links to it. Diigo gets a search engine boost, but the person who took the time and did the work to create that content doesn't. Meaning that his other sites would have done better in the search engines if he had posted that content elsewhere, where nofollow wasn't being used.

In effect, he is being penalised for having chosen Diigo (or some other black hole) as the place where he would post his content. Nofollow hurts the legitimate poster, while having absolutely no direct impact on the spammer. But it can have an indirect impact, as one can see by looking at services like Simpy, where the spam has taken over.

Think of the difference between being the one guy who's speeding while everybody else is staying below the limit, and being that same guy when everybody else is doing 85, too. You're still breaking the rules, and you still know that (theoretically) you can be slapped down for that, but there's a great feeling of safety in numbers. As the ratio of spam to legitimate content goes up, the spammers get bolder and more aggressive, as anybody who has ever been away from a forum he moderated for a little too long knows - spam tends to snowball, and probably for the same reason that the number of speeders will start to soar after a point; because one's chances of being one of the people grabbed and sanctioned are dropping. The life expectancy of one's spam is rising, and the profitability of it is doing likewise in the process, a thought that will lure more spammers in to take advantage of this opportunity.

There's the indirect impact on the spammers - by undercutting the incentive given to one's legitimate contributors, one helps create a friendlier environment for those spammers, which perhaps is why the rate of spammage has gone up since the introduction of nofollow. The law of unintended consequences has kicked in with a vengeance, and why wouldn't it? If somebody, in "real life" (offline) decides to treat all of his visitors as if they were scofflaws, hardly anybody is surprised when he eventually finds himself surrounded by nothing but scofflaws; honest men expect to be treated with respect. Why should life work any differently online? Because treating us all like we're spammers, even after we've proved that we're not through months or years of honest posting, isn't even remotely respectful. Even if it is fashionable.

Yes, I know that dealing with spammers can be exhausting, and I'm sure that one will be greatly tempted to believe that a shortcut can be found to doing that tedious, emotionally unrewarding task, much the same way as some of us would like to believe that we can find a fun way of getting around the need to do cleanup in the lab, or that's there's some diet that allows one to lose weight and reduce one's cholesterol while eating all of the steak, bacon and chocolate one wants, maybe by nibbling a few acai berries or something like that. But reality is what it is, and it either gets dealt with on its own terms, or it gets worse. Sometimes, a lot worse.

One doesn't win popularity points by reminding people of this, but it is the truth.

I recently found the following three entries marked "private" on my bookmark page, which I found surprising, because I've never marked a post "private" in the entire time I've been here. Links and blocked posts follow.

Drug War Goes Crazy, Cyclist Forced to Provide Sample at Son's Cremation

My comments: "This, regrettably, is no joke. An official barged in as the cyclist was making arrangements for his son's funeral.

Somebody needs to be fired, not reprimanded or suspended.

Tags: war on drugs, abuse of power, outrageous, insensitive less than a minute ago -All Annotations (0) -Cached -About

in group: Odd News"




Policing Porn Is Not Part of Job Description

My Comments: "Men in Black gone wild. Employees of a county department of Homeland Security decide to make their own laws about the viewing of porn.

Tags: abuse of authority, censorship 4 minutes ago and saved by 4 people -All Annotations (1) -Cached -About

in group: Computer and Internet, Computers and Internet, Odd News"



Teens send nude pics to one other, face kiddie porn charges - Ars Technica

My Comments: "Law that is good in principle, applied without the use of common sense or basic logic.

One of the reasons why underaged teens aren't allowed to consent to model nude - without parental consent, and there are issues enough in that to justify a whole other post - is because children are believed to lack the mental capacity to fully understand the decisions that they are making. Yet now they are to prosecuted for making those very same decisions on their own, as if they were competent adults who had preyed on incompetent children, luring them into decisions their victims might later regret, leaving us with a pick and mix in which the teens are regarded as being both competent and incompetent at same time, the state they are to be viewed as being in depending on the needs of the argument under which they are to be imprisoned at each given point.

Doublethink a la Orwell being used as a basis for Law, as the underaged are put in danger of sent to prison (where they are likely to be raped) using a law designed to protect them from a form of sexual exploitation.

Tags: injustice, court, law, trial, imprisonment, consent, pornography laws, common sense 7 minutes ago -All Annotations (0) -Cached -About

in group: philosophy, Philosophical perspectives"


Note the total absent of profanity, adult material, or anything else that might be reasonably considered to be unacceptable for general audiences in both my posts and the articles linked to. Yet somebody on staff took it upon himself to obscure these posts from public view, engaging in censorship in the process.

Is it Diigo's position that the only political views which may be heard in our comments are those that the staff personally views with approval? If so, this is completely unacceptable. If not, what efforts have been made to restrain those employees who have violated the trust put in them by users and employer alike by grossly exceeding their own authority?

I've switched the posts back from private to public. If Diigo is uncomfortable with this, I'm sure that it will do what it feels it needs to do, but it should understand that I will do the same. At this moment, I am very disappointed.

Those three bookmarks of mine, after staying public for a while, are private, again.

I would have to respectfully disagree with Mr. Perrin's guess. Whoever or whatever did this seemed to wait until my attention had wandered. System bugs don't tend to be smart enough to do that, but human beings do.

I suspect that Diigo has a rogue employee on its hands.

Graham Perrin wrote:

> Within the Diigo team there is expertise in "intelligent systems, a branch of artificial intelligence that examines methods and algorithms for systems to self-optimize and adapt".

Yeah ... rather intriguingly, in the majority of cases in which this alleged bug has made an appearance so far, we've apparently seen governmental conduct help up to criticism - providing a motive for censorship, should one not approve of this practice, and a motive to lie should one be caught in the act.

We also have no answer being given to the question of why it was that this bug didn't reappear until after a few days had passed, and one could expect the user's attention to have wavered. We just have you saying "Diigo's actions must be wholly innocent, because Diigo says so".

But maybe after you succeed in getting my bookmarks censored, though, you'll manage to get my posts censored as well, and you won't have to deal with the issue, at all.

Won't that be wonderful?

This was odd. I just went to my bookmark file, and in it, found a link to a page of mine at Geocities that I had recently moved elsewhere, Geocities being about to close.

I never bookmarked that page. I deleted the bookmark on sight, but am wondering what is going on. I was logged into Diigo as I cut and pasted that page to a new file. Could that be a problem? At a few points during the process, I saw Internet Explorer crash a few times, mentioning the Diigo toolbar as being the reason for the crash. This isn't happening often enough to be a serious problem, but I mention it, because maybe this will tell you something useful, this being the only other unusual thing I've seen the system do lately?




Lesson from the experience: If you see many of a user's own pages on his bookmark page, you shouldn't just assume that he's trying to spam Diigo. He might not even know that they're in his list of bookmarks. I only had this happen to me once - I think, I'll check those bookmarks in a bit - but if the system can hiccup once, there's no reason why some unlucky use couldn't see it do so repeatedly.

Is there?

Graham Perrin wrote:

> > At a few points during the process, I saw Internet Explorer crash
> > a few times, mentioning the Diigo toolbar as being the reason
>
> Please let us know:
>
> * the version of Windows

XP, version 5.1

> * the version of Internet Explorer

IE 7

> * the version of Diigo toolbar.

I have no idea. I joined Diigo on Feb. 9 of this year. I believe that I installed the toolbar the next day, in Internet Explorer. I could be mistaken on that point, but not by much; I was using that toolbar actively within a few days of joining, so probably whichever version of the toolbar people were uploading in early february.

I ran a search on "Diigo" "toolbar" and "version" on Google, and "toolbar" and "version" on Diigo itself, pulling up nothing of value. How does one tell which version one is using?

As I was editing my profile, I saw this floating sticky note on the edit page, from Emily Yamsek:

"stop talking to me, who are you?"

Having never heard of Emily Yamsek up until this point, I was a little confused, so I went to her profile and made a futile attempt to write to her, asking her what this was all about, before I noticed the date stamp on the sticky note

2009 - 04 - 01

I thought it was funny. I was going to say something about people cleaning up after April Fools, so that the clutter wouldn't accumulate over the years, but maybe that would be a good thing. Picture somebody coming by here in 2047 and being able to hear whispers of conversations from decades past. It would be fun, I think - it would give the site a little more character.

On looking through the terms of service, under "Content/Activity Prohibited" (section 8), I found this:

"6. provides any telephone numbers, street addresses, last names, URLs or email addresses;"

Strictly speaking, this would prohibit us from linking to any site at all; the moment one follows a bookmark, one is provided with the url of the site linked to, which will appear in the address bar of one's browser. A rather curious prohibition on a bookmarking site, as I'm sure the staff would agree. Yet, this would be one of 15 categories of content listed in a section introduced with this passage:

"The following is a partial list of the kind of Content that is illegal or prohibited to post on or through the Services. Diigo.com reserves the right to investigate and take appropriate legal action against anyone who, in Diigo.com's sole discretion, violates this provision, including without limitation, removing the offending communication from the Services and terminating the Membership of such violators. Prohibited Content includes, but is not limited to Content that, in the sole discretion of Diigo.com:"

implying that any use of the bookmarking service would be seen as a legally actionable misuse of the service, and grounds for termination of the member's access to that service!

I am guessing that this is not what Diigo meant to say, but there it is in black and white, deterring potential users from even getting accounts, and hurting Diigo's business in the process. Might Diigo be willing to consider the possibility of helping itself, by rewriting that clause?

Maggie Tsai wrote:

> We have made transferring your Furl links to Diigo quick and easy.
> Please visit the transfer page:

So we can understand ...

Is Diigo planning to close Furl, eventually, absorbing its users and content, the way Vox absorbed Pownce, or will the two sites continue to exist, side by side?

Some users might prefer Furl. I can't imagine why, but they're over there and not here, so they must see something I don't. Leaving Furl in existence might leave those users with a more favorable view of Diigo.

Maggie Tsai wrote:

> Joseph,
>
> Yes - given that we have very frequent website and toolbar updates,
> we'll be migrating furl users to the Diigo community and phasing out Furl.

I have an account at Furl, but never made use of it because of navigability issues. (Homepage links don't work in Furl, and my attempt to confect a substitute didn't work).

Is there any danger that, during migration, my Furl account will be dropped on top of my Diigo account, resulting in the contents of the latter being deleted? Should I delete my Furl account to ensure that this won't happen, or might the Diigo system read that as a request to delete my Diigo account?

Josh K. wrote:

> I had an existing diigo account and I did the import and my original
> diigo links remained after the import. So I think you should go ahead
> and do the import.

As I said, I had an account on Furl, but I've never really used the thing, so there's nothing for me to import. Still, thank you for taking the time to tell me about that. I'm glad the move worked out for you.



That having been said, I've never been a fan of Furl, and personally, I'm not going to miss the place one bit. This isn't because of the users on Furl, or the content they submit. Both seemed fine, and I hope the latter will enjoy Diigo. If their tastes are at all like mine, I think they'll find it to be an upgrade, especially should Diigo decide to have their old urls forward to their new urls, avoiding any link breakage - but if their tastes were at all like mine, would they still be Furl users? What I didn't care for, on that service, were limits on functionality that were put in place without any good reason for them being seen, at least not by me.

I've mentioned the absence of a homepage link on Furl accounts. Let's say that I had put it to active use, filling my profile with bookmarks as I've been doing here on Diigo. Having done so, I would then find myself having to decide whether or not to link to that profile, and finding myself presented with no good choices.

If I linked to my profile from my other sites, there would have been no way for my visitors to return to my sites from my Furl profile, raising one-way site issues with Webring and maybe costing me a number of ring memberships. If, on the other hand, I had set up said profile without linking to it from my other sites, who would have ever seen it? The whole thing was turning into a massive headache, because, as far as I was concerned, the old Furl management had decided to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. How hard is it, really, to provide the users - the people from whom the service gets 100% of the content on which its business is built - as simple a thing as a working homepage link, something that many social networking sites provide their users without any disaster following?

I decided that I could do a lot better than Furl, and on looking around, found that I did, immediately. Stumbleupon, Diigo and Ma.gnolia have all been much better experiences than the one Furl seemed to be promising, and even if Ma.gnolia fell apart, at least Larry Halff was trying. Honest mistakes I can forgive. When somebody creates a needless hardship, just for fun - that's what I can't forgive. On a personal level, I am just as glad to see Furl go.

The recommendation I gave that Furl be left to run in parallel with Diigo was given far more out of concern for Diigo than for Furl. I've seen mergers like this done, and they tend to be bitterly resented by the users of the service which goes away, who usually end up asking something like "what about our freedom of choice; this merger doesn't seem to do anything for us but take that freedom away". I suppose that I can sympathise with that. I can't imagine why anybody would prefer Furl to Diigo, but then, I also can't imagine why anybody would want to listen to old Lawrence Welk albums or watch Nascar racing. All the same, better that I or anybody else be mystified, than that those with differing tastes be frustrated.

Obviously, there's a serious demand for what Furl was offering - one only had to look at the level of activity on the main page to see that. That demand is now going to go unmet, making enemies for Diigo who will then, not only be invited to come into a community under the care of a company they resent, but will fairly be shoved into it, being told that they must move their content to this site, if they are not to have it deleted. I am not sure that this is a wise choice on Diigo's part, and again, would urge those in management to carefully consider their choices.

I've looked around the groups, and found Diigo to be a very happy, peaceful kind of place. I'd really like to see it stay that way, but if there's a sudden flood of angry users looking for somebody to be angry with, I have to wonder how peaceful Diigo will stay. But management will do what it will do.