Art of Manliness and Digg.com
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Some of you may have noticed that starting several weeks ago, if you tried to submit an AoM story to Digg.com, it would be rejected. Digg has labeled the Art of Manliness as spam, and blocked submissions from our site.
We have resigned ourselves to this fate. But we are embarrassed that people will see us labeled as spam when they try to submit our content. The Art of Manliness is about honor, integrity, and manning up-the antithesis of spamming. Therefore, we would like to assure our readers that we have never, ever spammed or gamed the Digg system. Honestly and truly. Those articles which did well on Digg, did well because people liked and appreciated them.
We appealed to Digg to remove this block, but Digg refuses to do so. They did not cite any evidence of wrongdoing, but basically said that since people on Digg said we are spam, than that means we are spam, regardless of the actual facts.
We know that you all don’t think AoM consists of spam material. Neither do dozens of major blogs and mainstream media sites. Here’s a brief run down of places around the web Art of Manliness has been featured:
- Fox News
- Neatorama
- Mental Floss (and again)
- Andrew Sullivan (twice!)
- Lifehacker
- ChannelFlip (an awesome internet television channel that gave AoM an unprecedented 5 out of 5 stars)
- The Huffington Post
- Dark Roasted Blend
- And hundreds of other sites
Thank you for your past support with Digg. Our exposure on that site helped grow the blog tremendously and introduce it to many readers. For that we are grateful. If you would like to continue to promote the Art of Manliness, submit and vote for our articles on Reddit, del.icio.us, and Stumbleupon.
Best Regards-
Brett and Kate
Wow. What a shame. I am sorry that DIGG has labeled your site and articles as SPAM. Just another reason in my book why I have opted NOT to visit DIGG anymore….
A of M, on the other hand… is an oasis in the web. I don’t visit as often as I could, but when I do, I am always glad, and usually inspired, too. Keep up the good/great work!
- Rod
yeah, Digg is going to the pits. I’ve actually started reading slashdot more than digg; the home page of digg is almost entirely spam (huffingtonpost is more worthy to be called spam than AoM)
The digg algorithm for spam is complete bullshit. It only factors in people who call a site spam, once it reaches a certain amount, that’s it, your marked as spam. It in no way takes into account diggs or total stories, which I assume is because of people gaming digg. I realize it must be hard to counteract people gaming them, but the current way is broken beyond repair.
That sucks on getting blocked out on Digg, reminds of the auto bury algo Digg had a while ago that despite how much momentum a story had, certain URLs were always buried despite having no user buries mentioned. Happened to my old Blog, never got a response from Digg
It’s funny how sites that have excellent content like AoM are getting banned from Digg because their users are retarded.
Keep up the great work guys. Art of Manliness is one of the premier blogs on the web, and I couldn’t be happier that it’s a part of LifeRemix.
I have always been floored by the adolescents on Digg. I dropped them an email letting them know what nonsense this is, though I’m older than 13 so I suspect they don’t care. Regardless, I will no longer be using Digg. Always liked Slashdot better anyhow!
And yet every XKCD comic gets the front page immediately. I think Digg is an unfortunate victim of groupthink, and am thankful for Slashdot’s existence and staying power.
Digg did, however, introduce me to AoM, and for this, I am grateful.
I don’t really mind. It seems to me that this site is the antithesis of digg. This is the one place on the internet that I have found where the comments are actually mature and relate/contribute to the given topic. Digg has gone from a place of lightning fast tech industry news to an immature, biased, 4chan replica. My only regret is that the worthwhile topics discussed on this site will not be read by a group of people who so desperately need to hear them
Punks.
Hey sorry to hear about that. This kind of injustice really appeals to a guy. How do you handle injustice? How do you handle it when someone falsely labels you and your efforts at doing something good?
The Digg people: Just another bunch of MF’s who think they own the world.
This is, in effect, censorship. And the lowest form of life on the planet is a censor. Lower than critics or child molesters (who theoretically have mental problems) and way lower than lawyers.
The censor is a pathetic creature who believes their morals are so superior they can dictate what the rest of us watch or read.
The Art of Manliness is not spam. It is a necessary source of information - especially these days when there are so few intelligent and cultured men (like us) around.
I look forward to receiving the AOM in my inbox. Keep up the good work.
Ian Millard
example of
Hold the phone, Ian. The AoM isn’t being censored. It’s just considered spam on Digg. Censorship would be if an organized effort to shut down AoM was successful. AoM is still fully available.
I don’t understand Digg’s problem with this site but, well, it’s really their loss.
Max
I believe social media sites get “spammed” by link bait, not so much the traditional type that gets emailed to you.
This site has all the traits of a social-media marketable blog; fortunately it has quality content to back it up.
Max-
It is censorship because Digg won’t put AoM back on the site. If people simply marked it as spam and that what that, than that wouldn’t be censorship. But for a site to refuse to remove you from the spam list when they know you’re not spam, is censorship.
Everyone thinks Digg is democratic in nature-the stories that people like get dugg up while the stories people don’t like get buried. But there are human editors who watch behind the scenes and yank off stuff they don’t like. “Autobury” is not a myth. They just pull off websites they decide against. It’s f-in censorship.
Right on, Tony.
Censorship is: the suppression of speech or the deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful or sensitive, as determined by a censor.
This certainly qualifies as “deletion of communicative material”, and although I don’t always agree with what I have read on AoM, none of it has ever been “obscene, vulgar, and/or highly objectionable.”
Ian
Honestly, my experience with Digg with my own website has been nothing short of disappointing. Digg seems to be a very childish high school clique where if you are not part of the “in crowd’ your stuff gets buried or marked as spam. Because it is based on a voting system where some users are considered more powerful than others it is truly not democratic.
You are better off without Digg in my opinion.
I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. Digg is a little boys’ club made up of non-manly children who are probably frightened by your scary talk of “barber shops”, “responsibility”, “how to ask a man for his daughter’s hand in marriage”, and other topics they’ve never heard of.
Sorry to hear about this, and I definitely don’t understand it. How could anyone think AoM is spam?
Digg is what introduced me to the AoM. It’s unfortunate to see this happen. I have contacted Digg regarding this and informed them that I will no longer be using their service as long as this goes uncorrected. Maybe it won’t mean anything to them, but it doesn’t hurt to try.
@Robb and Ryan-
I appreciate you emailing Digg. Thanks for the support.
That sucks! Like Ryan, I found AoM through Digg and now I’m dedicated fan of your site. Not that I use digg that much, but I wonder what other great site they call “spam” and aren’t reaching the right readers.
Sorry to hear about that, any idea why that happened - i.e. is there a threshold where you can only submit so many articles from the same account for the same site or something like that?
There’s not officially a threshold for how many things can be submitted from one site per se, but they do frown on submitting your own stuff excessively. But we never did that. A lot of people right before the ban were submitting old stuff that had already been on digg before so maybe that did tick them off. But we have no control over that. So I’m not sure what happened really. It seemed to happen around the time our post about displaying the flag was on digg, and I suspect that many digg users marked that one as spam.
I found you from digg.com a couple of months ago. Very upset to hear this and will be contacting them in disgust.
That’s because there are no MEN in digg
just a bunch of kids. they wouldn’t even be able to begin to grasp the concept of AofM
Just wanted to let you know that I created a Reddit account just so I could vote for your stuff.
The 3 top users of Digg have consistently submitted content from this site. Clearly, Digg management did not have the courtesy to look into this, and their decision suggests that their top users are spammers.
Digg is such a joke. I’m outraged by this. I will continue to support theartofmanliness on my own personal blogs and continue to read.