In Digg, there is the Bury feature. This is basically giving a “thumbs-down” to something you don’t like. If you wanted to bury a story you would hit this button: Digg Bury. If people “bury” a story enough times it will either not make the homepage or be taken down from the homepage.

The same concept also applies to comments for a story. If you don’t like someone’s comment - you simply give them the “Thumbs-Down” and bury their comment Digg Bury Comment. You can then set your comment threshold so that you don’t view anything with a certain amount of “buries” (for example -6).

In principle this is a great system because it should keep the flow of the conversation moving smoothly. No longer any need to read some rambling idiot’s diatribe or a forum spammer touting his wares. Digg also employs threaded commenting which allows you to respond directly to someone else’s comment. Again - this is also designed to keep a conversation going over hundreds of comments. The people “speak” and much like Cesar give a thumbs up or thumbs down and decide a comment’s fate.

So what was the most egregious and offending comment ever posted on Digg? What got more buries then any comment ever? Was it something about killing babies? Or perhaps a statement about the Haulocaust never happening?

Digg Most Buried Comment Ever

Granted Chandler didn’t really add anything to the conversation other than some nice words (a huge NO-NO when commenting on Digg by the way). Chandler also made the other huge mistake of dropping his URL underneath his name (probably out of habit). So at first glance it seems like Chandler was just trying to get his URL out and get people over to his site to hopefully get them to click on his ads - the only problem is that Chandler is a 19 year old college kid with no ads on his site.

As a result of that comment and the resulting backlash Chandler’s phone number was posted, his life was called into question, his design skills were ripped, he received lots of IMs and calls from angry diggers and more. Luckily Chandler has a sense of humor so he decided to write up a post about his experience. The result? His story hit the Digg homepage and is still going strong with almost 3,000 Diggs at the time of writing. This is a fun story that kind that people like to link to (much like I am doing now). Well done.

The moral of the story? When Digg gives you lemons - make linkanade.

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Posted by Chris Winfield at 11:49 am
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