Here's the situation: someone runs a political blog, supporting a candidate you don't like. And you want to get rid of this website's only source of traffic, Digg. It only takes an hour of work to flag that website as spam and prevent future postings from ever getting to Digg.
For our example, we took a political blog [they asked us to remove their name], which has no recognizable spam, but plenty of Anti-Bush politics. Now that we had our target, we had one person submit every page that wasn't already on Digg. Next, we had two or three people go to Digg's "Upcoming" section, and flag each of the new links as Spam.
After about ten submissions...
Its important to get the site right after it is submitted, otherwise the amount of spam flags it takes goes up exponentially.We explained the situation to Digg, hoping they would give this innocent political website their rights back.
But Digg is powerless against this. We sent a note to Digg, explaining what we had done and that they should unblock the political blog. They sent a canned response back.
So there you have it. Not only is Digg exploitable, but they are powerless to fix their exploit. There is no review process, and the staff relies solely on their algorithms.
Dear *****
Thanks for taking the time to contact us at Digg.com regarding this website.
As you know, Digg is a community-driven website – our community has consistently reported the domain to which you refer as spam.
Because unblocking this domain would not be in line with the best interests of the larger Digg community, we will not reverse this decision.
--Digg Support
