Discussion on Diigo Community. I found that posts that were supposed to be public were being turned into private ones, and that others were having the same problem.

WARNING: Mild profanity at the other end of this link, too. Unavoidable, as it is found in the quoted material. Brief report of the incident, along with a much longer taped interview with the banned user, marred by prejudgement from the interviewer, who can't seem to let go of a fixation on the idea both sides in this absurd incident must have a point, or that at least Digg must. Quoting the post: "We get the feeling that there is more to this story than we have managed to unearth ... Clearly Digg feels that Zaibatsu has violated their terms multiple times and it appears they've simply had enough." In other words, corporate spin should be taken naively, at face value. Zaibatsu does himself no favors in his response, by choosing to be conciliatory in his response. In a civilized society, there's nothing wrong with that, but we're not living in one of those. We're living in one that still bears imprint of the same fun loving culture that brought us the concept of "trial by combat" and it shows. When you are wronged and you are speaking, keep it short, keep it sweet, and let your anger show. Do not offer to turn the other cheek, and do not express concern for those who have wronged you, for these civilized acts will never be understood by the uncivilized men with whom you deal to be anything other than a confession of guilt.

Points to a disproportionately large number of posts about the political candidate Ron Paul that were buried on Digg, in support of the premise of that so-called "bury brigades" exist on Digg, groups of users who vote against articles en masse when they don't like them, "philosophically". This should surprise absolutely nobody who is familiar with Digg's basic operating principles and has been online for more than ten minutes in his life, but sometimes people need evidence in support of the obvious. Putting the feeedom to be heard on a topic to a vote - how do people expect that to work out?

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."