Digg: Kudos to Kevin

FastCompany's Saabira Chaudhuri is in the midst of a dust up in the social networking world. She recently authored a who's who of women in Web 2.0. I liked it so much that I submitted it to Mixx, one of the many sites where members submit news articles or blog items for dicussion. Mixx is small and friendly, so far. A few of my Mixx "followers" voted it up, but it did not generate a conversation.

Chaudhuri's article was also submitted to Digg, a much, much larger social networking and news aggregtion site. My "friend" brainnovate sent it in to Digg. A conversation did erupt over there. Some of the comments disagreed with Chaudhuri's selections, but, very unfortunately, a substantial amount of ugliness also showed up.

Chaudhuri blogged about the sexism in the commentary earlier this week. Today, I was happy to see an update to her post . Her complaints were heard by Digg's founder Kevin Rose:

(Update: Digg's founder Kevin Rose emailed me after I posted this blog to say that his team is in the process of deleting any comments on this article that violate the site's terms of use. ...)

Yesterday, Chaudhuri interviewed Beth Murphy, Digg's director of marketing and communication, who reported that Digg went further than removing the comments. They " banned between 20 to 30 users who commented on Fast Company’s article." I didn't see all of the comments, so I'm not in a position to judge that action. Only 2 of those quoted by Chaudhuri seem to be among the banned.

This stuff is difficult. Digg is a very large, very diverse collection of people. Some are there to find interesting content. Some are there to voice their well-considered opinions. Some are there to promote their own sites. Some are there to make trouble. Trying to please all of the people all of the time is, quite simply, impossible.

Some forums have a heavy hand with moderation; some a very light touch. Digg is in the latter camp. Personally, I prefer that. I'm pretty thick skinned and only get annoyed when individuals follow me around intentionally disrupting conversations I'm trying to have. Given that, I was surprised by this round of bannings. None of the comments she quoted struck me as a bannable offense.

There's a good chance that she didn't quote the worst examples. I can't give the full text of some comments that attack me, rather than my ideas, in a thread about my criticizing Digg for banning some power users.

The comments at Digg ranged from compliments to insults, with a few reasoned arguments both for and against what I said. Of the insults, I was amused when YodaJones called me "a idiot." But damian7's rebuttal -- "The author is a stupid [expletive deleted]" -- lacked the amusement of even a grammatical error.

What amazed my in Chaudhuri's interview with Murphy was the ratio of moderators to submissions and comments. Murphy says that Digg "gets about 16,000 submissions on any given day, and about 32,000 comments. We have a skeleton team of folks, one to two people on the site answering emails, deleting spam, that sort of stuff. "

Computerworld has far less commentary to moderate, but we have more than a skeleton crew to keep an eye on things. We also have automated spam filters that would have caught that [expletive deleted] before it reached our pages. I don't think Digg should necessarily remove such "bad language." But if not, then I'm not quite sure about these bannings. It's okay to call me an [expletive deleted] but not okay to make a sexual remark about someone else? Seems odd, but that's the trouble with human moderators. They just aren't perfect.

Kevin, kudos for removing the worst of the comments on Chauduri's article. I hope the bannings were justified by a pattern of bad behavior on the part of the banned individuals, rather than one time offenses. But either way, my sincere good wishes on the difficult task of allowing as much free speech as possible in a some times nasty and hateful, some times interesting and enlightening, playground.