How to handle getting buried on Digg

From Karoli at Odd Time Signatures comes the story (via The Zero Boss, and prior to that Chris Winfield of the website 10e20) of one Chandler Kent, a 19-year-old college student who wandered into the sights of the Digg bury brigade. In this case, it was Chandler’s comment that got buried, and may have become the most buried comment ever. But there’s a twist.

As Chandler describes it in a long and hilarious post here, he posted a quick comment on a Digg link, saying he liked the site that was linked to, and (big mistake) attached his blog’s URL. This set off alarm bells as a “spam” comment — like the ones I get all the time that say “I am liking your content very much!” with a link to some porn or poker site — and so it got buried repeatedly.

Chandler also got some fairly abusive comments, which is typical of the mentality that one finds at Digg, and why many people have given up on reading the comments at all. His phone number was also posted by some unscrupulous Digger, and people even abused him via instant messenger.

More evidence of what is wrong with Digg, as Zero Boss notes. But there’s a happy ending, in a sense: Chandler’s post about what happened has gotten Dugg about 4,000 times, and he has used the criticisms about the crappy design of his website to start a contest to redesign it. Nice work, Chandler.

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