Let me explain. Yesterday I submitted a story to Digg. I didn’t expect it to get on the home page, but I had an “Oh well, what the hell” mentality about it. My plan was to do the usual–shout it once and call it a day. After I submit a link to Digg, I typically shout the story to my friends in about three waves. You can only send a shout to about 100 friends at a time, so if you have 300 friends, you have to break the list up into thirds and shout the story 3 separate times. Also, Digg prevents you from sending the shouts immediately back to back–you have to send a shout, wait a while, then send it again. This is to prevent spamming and abuse.
Anyway, back to my story. Continue to gather around as if I’m telling you the tale of how John Henry was a steel drivin’ man. I submitted my story and hit the “Share” button. When you click on “Share,” it typically pulls up your list of friends who are able to receive shouts, and you can click on whoever you want to send your story to.
This time, however, instead of pulling up my friends list, I saw this message:
I pinged some colleagues on IM and asked them if they’ve ever had this happen to them before. One of my friends said, “How many friends do you have on Digg?” I looked:
Okay, so I have a lot of friends on Digg. That’s not so bad, right? I mean, all I do is befriend people who become fans of me. The whole point on having friends on Digg is so that you can share stories with each other, and the Shout feature allows you to share stories with a large number of friends vs. having to contact them all one-by-one. Why then would Digg penalize me for having too many friends? Did I hit some mysterious “max number,” like once you get to 500, it’s too many? If that’s the case, why don’t they make it clear that you can only have a certain number of friends?
I don’t see how they could think I’m a spammer. Here are my stats:
I filled out a bug report and emailed [email protected] with the subject “You guys shout-blocked me! I thought we were bros…” I haven’t received a response from Digg yet save for a stupid automatic response regarding my bug report:
Hi –
Sorry for the inconvenience. Try clearing your cache/cookies and restart your browser. If you’re still having problems, please email us back and we’ll do our best to help you.
Thanks.
– Digg Support Team
Yeah, of course, clearing my cookies will magically fix the ridiculous “Crikey!” message and let me send shouts again. (FYI, I humored them and tried it to no avail.) I currently still can’t send shouts to people via the “Share” feature. Someone suggested that I start deleting friends because I look like a spammer with so many, but I really think that’s unfair. If Digg wants you to have only a certain number of friends, they should put a cap on the number of friends you can have. Plus, as I said earlier, the whole frickin’ point of befriending people on Digg is so you can check out stuff that they like, have dugg or commented on, and so you can send and receive stories. It’s like the cable company turning off your cable access once you’ve bought HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax. That’s one channel too many, so you can’t see any of them now. Harumph.
So, there you have it. I can’t send shouts to people because I happen to have a large number of friends. Even though my stats prove that I’m not a spammer, Digg seems content to penalize me, anyway. I’ll let you know if I ever receive an actual useful response from anyone at Digg (though one of my friends online pinged some of his buddies who work at Digg about the issue, and their response was a “We’ll look into it” in an eye-rolling, whatever tone). Until then, however, I’ll be surfing Digg with a cone around my neck like a neutered dog:
Postscript: Thanks a bunch to Lorna (check out the comments below) for helping me figure out how to pull up my buddies list letter by letter (it’s a bit tedious, but it works). Looks like I’m not quite shout-blocked, I’m just slowed down a bit, but for crying out loud, you’d think that Digg could, you know, explain how to pull up lists of friends once you hit a certain number and need to start filtering the list in order to have it displayed at all. Instead of “Start typing to filter your friends list,” the message could say “Type a letter to pull up the appropriate friends,” or something to that effect. Digg, you suck. Lorna, you rock.
