Did Digg Just Committed Social Network Suicide?

People who owns social networking sites are delusional if they don't realize that the most valuable assets are the users. The users are the one bringing a vast amount of content free of charge, and doing so increase the traffic on the sites making it a good prospect for advertisers.

Digg could claim to be the best social networking site for news & politics, up until to day that is. It had 3 features that made the discussions from all across the political spectrum and from all over the world more lively and urgent than anywhere else on the web.

One key feature remains: The front page one. It allows content to go "viral". The two other ones, scrapped by Digg today, were the "shout it " feature and the "Blog it " feature. The 1st one had the great advantage to let you share immediately a story link with your mutual friends, the 2ND one was useful for bloggers to post a link on their own blog.

Active Digg users will have to use other social networking sites (namely Facebook & Twitter) or email to connect with their friends on Digg. It will have the effect to give a serious blow to a burgeoning community.

This absurd business decision only make sense if Digg is in negotiations with either Facebook or Twitter, and one of the condition of the sale deal is for Digg to kill some of its unique features.

What social networking sites should keep in mind in that their only valuable assets are users,nothing more and nothing else.

I would not be surprised if Digg put back the features very soon once traffic on the site go down to a trickle.

Social Network:Does Newsvine Practice Political Censorship?

I used to have an account on Newsvine, up until I wrote a couple of hard hitting opinion pieces.I got shut down & never got any explanation for it from the site administrator, even after numerous inquiries from my part. Is it political censorship, and should the blogging community be concerned about it?

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Social Network:Does Newsvine Practice Political Censorship?

There is a myriad of social network sites out on the web dedicated to a countless range of topics. As a blogger, I am on quite a few: Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and of course Digg.

I used to be on Newsvine, and I was quite active on it. A few weeks ago, I wrote two hard hitting articles critical of Obama. One was titled: " The candidate for change has become the President of more of the same".

Newsvine, in appearance, seems to be a very open minded community. It is good for news & politics, a lot of journalists & bloggers go there and write original content. They claim to be regulated by their own users community. One of the good thing about Newsvine is that you get paid ( a very small amount that is) for the content you post or aggregate. This is based on the amount of hits you get on your respective page.

In my case, this is what happened. I basically got shut down without any notice or explanation for that matter. It literally happened out of the blue. I contacted the site 5 times and never got an answer from them on why my account was cancelled.

The fact that they never had the guts or the courtesy to let me know if I broke any of the user's agreement rules lead me to think that I was shut down for expressing my political opinions. I am just guessing that other users filled a complain against me. It amounts to nothing less than political censorship, and has to be denounced as such.

As far as social networks specializing in news & politics; I don't think anybody in their right mind can contest the leading role of Digg. Reddit, Newsvine, Twitter or Facebook are just not on par with Digg.

MercyPolitics in the Digg Graveyard on Social Blade.

Today, I am writing from the Digg graveyard of Social Blade. If you check you will find me at number 393. The bizarre part of it is that my Digg account seems to be working fine. I did contact Social Blade & Digg support to let them know. If my status of " living dead " become fully dead (on Digg), this will be obviously my last submission.....

UPDATE: I just had a word from Digg, I am not banned and Digg notified me that they have nothing to do with Social Blade in any way, shape or form. I also contacted Social Blade, and I just got off the " Graveyard " list that they keep of banned Digg users.Anyhow, I am back on the " alive "(active) Digg users.

Digg Takes Down Blog Links From Users Bio Section.

Digg is not displaying the links that users have for their own blogs and link to other social networks that they might be on. I am wondering about the logic behind this or if it is just a temporary maintenance issue. I did check on numerous users pages, and it is the case across board.I think we deserve an explanation considering we are basically providing Digg free news content.

Update 3/15/2009:Per a Digg administrator, the links were shut down temporally for a data transfer maintenance this week-end.They are all supposed to be back and running normally on Monday.

The Politics of Digg

As the site grew increasingly popular, it became the target of more and more users who wanted to game the system; entire companies sprouted up offering to promote stories for money and homogenized groups worked together to promote their own agendas and content. The site administrators eventually rolled out new algorithms that necessitated a. . .

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