I  was an active user on Digg until September of 2008.  I was banned for using a script.  That being said I still enjoy going through the front page of Digg to see what new and unusual content is out there. I am also active on Stumbleupon.  I recently came across a story regarding a Cease and Desist letter Digg sent to  a company called USocial. Without getting into massive detail, USocial allegedly sells positive votes for content submitted on Digg, Stumbleupon and Propeller.   A positive vote is a key basic element in propelling submitted content to the “Front Page” of these sites which in turn can generate thousands of unique user hits.  This occurs when enough positive votes are accumulated and whatever other algorithmic factors are satisfied depending on the particular social media site.  This is a big deal if your web site brings in advertising dollars.  When I wrote about using email lists to generate enough diggs and diversity to get my blog stories to the front page of Digg there was no money involved.  My blog has never had advertising. It was all for fun. USocial is the big time.  They would not be doing it if there were no market for it.  A blogosphere ready and willing to help them turn a profit. The obvious Digg correlation is that they either have a lot of  nobodys with huge active friend lists signed up or there are some Digg  “powerusers” selling Diggs.  The math is pretty simple.  That however presupposes that most of the USocial business is from Digg.  They could be making their money off of Stumbleupon or Propeller votes.  The relatively popularity of the  particular site is irrelevant.(Digg is by far the most popular) The issue would be what  social platform best helps the particular web site’s traffic.  That is where they will be buying the votes.

Cease and Desists letters are are not uncommon in the business world.  They are simply threats of legal action if person or company does not stop engaging in a certain type of behavior that the sender considers detrimental to its business and in violation of  particular principal of applicable law.  The sending of a Cease and Desists letter does not necessarily means that there is any legal basis to win the day in court.  It means an attorney has an argument that they will win the day.  They are also sent when there is no day to win.  They are  leveraged implied threats by companies that have money directed at offending companies and inviduals that do not have money for lawyers and protracted litigation.  The implied threat being that the  cost of the legal process itself will put them out of business.  The determining factor in their success is often a simple function of who the elephant in the room is.  The Cease And Desist from Digg to USocial as posted on Mashable allegedly reads as follows:

My firm represents Digg, Inc. (”Digg”). We have become aware that uSocial.net (”uSocial”) is paying users of www.Digg.com to manipulate content rankings on the Digg website. Digg hereby places you on notice that its website terms of use (located at http://digg.com/tos) expressly state:

IN ADDITION, YOU HEREBY AGREE THAT YOU SHALL NOT USE THE SERVICE (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, BY “DIGGING” ANY CONTENT) ON BEHALF OF (OR PER THE REQUEST OR INSTRUCTION OF) ANY THIRD PARTY. FURTHERMORE, YOU SHALL NOT REQUEST THAT ANY THIRD PARTY, OR PAY OR OTHERWISE ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE ANY THIRD TO, MANIPULATE OR OTHERWISE AFFECT THE SITE IN ANY MANNER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, BY PAYING ANY OTHER USER TO “DIGG” ANY CONTENT).

Pursuant to the website terms of use, your manipulation of Digg’s content rankings constitutes tortious interference with Digg’s agreements (i.e. its website terms of use) with the Digg users involved such activity.

Digg hereby demands that you immediately cease all attempts to have Digg users manipulate or otherwise affect the Digg service. Please provide us with written confirmation of your understanding of this matter within the next ten (10) days and assure us that the foregoing demands will be met.

This message should not be construed as a waiver of rights, an offer of settlement, or reliance on any specific facts or legal theories. Digg reserves all of its rights and remedies under applicable law.

If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact me at

This is not the first time the Cease and Desist has been used to stop gaming, bots and the like.   MySpace was involved in a publicized battle with the commercial marketers of Bot programs such as Friend-Adder and Badder-Adder These programs automated friend adding and commenting protocols bypassing the Myspace captcha safeguards.  MySpace sent Cease and Desist letters to these companies briefly shutting many of them down.  It is important to note that the companies that shut down did not do so by court order but voluntarily.  Myspace had the financial leverage to scare them into shutting down if just temporarily. In that situation they were the elephant in the room.   As the scripts circulated and were improved upon, new companies popped up as fast as the old ones shut down.  With the exception of suing spam king Scott Richter and instituting some onerous captcha and sophisticated I.P.tracking they finally gave up chasing after these bot developers.  The MySpace pursuit logic was that these bots violated state and federal anti-spam laws as they allowed people to bypass the captcha spam safeguards and send tens of thousands of comments to its membership base.

I will break down Digg’s letter point by point addressing the legal issues:

“ IN ADDITION, YOU HEREBY AGREE THAT YOU SHALL NOT USE THE SERVICE (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, BY “DIGGING” ANY CONTENT) ON BEHALF OF (OR PER THE REQUEST OR INSTRUCTION OF) ANY THIRD PARTY. FURTHERMORE, YOU SHALL NOT REQUEST THAT ANY THIRD PARTY, OR PAY OR OTHERWISE ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE ANY THIRD TO, MANIPULATE OR OTHERWISE AFFECT THE SITE IN ANY MANNER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, BY PAYING ANY OTHER USER TO “DIGG” ANY CONTENT).”

This in itself probably has no legal implications with regard to USocial.  USocial as a company is not a party to the Digg Terms Of Use. They have no contractual relationship with Digg.  By paying people to Digg or charging for Diggs, they are not breaching any agreement.   Digg’s contractual breach issue would be with the Digg members they are paying.  Digg would have to track individual members down and take action against them for violating Terms Of Use.  Digg could in fact attempt to do this in a lawsuit against USocial by subpoenaing their records for the list of Diggers they are paying.  This would be a cumbersome way to go as it would be difficult for Digg to continue chasing these people down.  A reason similar to why Myspace allegedly gave up.

“Pursuant to the website terms of use, your manipulation of Digg’s content rankings constitutes tortious interference with Digg’s agreements (i.e. its website terms of use) with the Digg users involved such activity.”

Since Digg has no contractual privity with USocial they attempt to classify USocial activity as a third party tort entitled “tortious interference with contract” What is tortious interference with contract?  California law would probably apply in any lawsuit filed. I will address it under general tort principals.

The general elements of tortious interference with contractual relationships  are: (1) the existence of a contract subject to interference; (2) the occurrence of an act of interference that was willful and intentional; (3) the act was a proximate cause of the claimant’s damage; and (4) actual damage or loss occurred.

Digg first must prove the existence of a contract subject to interference.  Is The Digg Terms Of User agreement a legal enforceable agreement? There is case law out there regarding “click wrap” agreements. They are generally enforceable.  A party posts terms on its website pursuant to which it offers to sell goods or services. To buy these goods, the purchaser is required to indicate his assent to be bound by the terms of the offer by his conduct — typically the act of clicking on a button stating “I agree.”  Once the purchaser indicates his agreement to be bound, the contract is formed on the posted terms, and the sale is consummated. No paper record is created nor is the signature of the purchaser required. While the Digg Terms Of Use are not as bulletproof as a click wrap here are the general elements of enforceability:

1. The user must have adequate notice that the proposed terms exist;
2. The user must have a meaningful opportunity to review the terms;
3. The user must have adequate notice that taking a specified, optional action manifests assent to the terms; and
4. The user must, in fact, take that action.

So does Digg have an enforceable Terms Of Use Agreement that can be tortiously interfered with?  It would have to be evaluated on a case by case basis.  The Digg Terms Of Use is not a “community contract”.   In many cases the people behind the avatars are not who they say they are and in some cases may not even have the capacity to contract(they lied about their age in signing up).   They key point being is that if there is an enforceable agreement it is not with the Digg community but with each end user/Digger who agreed to be bound by the Terms Of Use.  This creates  practical and logistical problems for Digg in a tortious interference case against USocial.  In order to prevail they would probably have to prove up individual user agreements that were interfered with.  They would have to prove up the standard elements of a contractual agreement. USocial can not interfere with a contract that is void or does not exist in the first place.

Digg will have to prove that USocial is recruiting  people with valid contractual agreements with Digg and inducing them to breach that agreement.  What if the Diggers are coming voluntarily to USocial?  Does that change the analysis?  They will then have to prove damages.  That would be worth the price of admission in itself. Digg would to an extent have lay out its business model and inner workings.  I suspect much of that evidence wold be produced under seal(shielded from the public). The other price of admission event would be when USocial is forced to turn over the list of people it has selling Diggs. Expect a whole new wave of bannings when that happens. The names may suprise a lot of people.  The point is that shutting down USocial and others companies that may spring up selling Diggs, Stumbles, Reddit Votes, is more complicated than sending out a  Cease and Desist letter. This is especially true if they have some money behind them and their own attorneys.  I suspect USocial has attorneys who may agree with me.  As of the writing of this article they are still up and running.

It may also be possible for Digg to obtain a Temporary Restraining Order(TRO) prohibiting USocial from inducing any more Diggers to breach their Terms Of Use agreements. To my knowledge the issue has never been litigated and no temporary restraining order or injunction obtained.  The general elements Digg would have to show are :

A  likelihood of success on the underlying tortious interference claim; irreparable harm for which it has no adequate remedy at law;that greater injury will be suffered from denying the order, and that the granting would not disserve the public interest.

I suspect this would be the next  thing Digg does if they are serious about shutting USocial down.  In order to get the restraining order and injunction they would have to convince a judge that they will in all likelyhood win the underlying tortious interference claim.  This is like a “mini-trial” where a  lot of the same evidence is layed out.  They will also have to show that they have no other adequate remedy at law. USocial will certainly claim Digg has  other remedies.  Is their a way for Digg to identify and go after its own offending member base?  If there is they may not be entitled to a TRO against USocial.   Digg will have to show they are suffering irreparable harm.  They will have to lay out to an extent their algorithim and business model and how the selling of Diggs affects this. They will then have to translate that into damages.  The argument would probably be that if people game the system, it loses its integrity,no one buys advertising, other revenue streams go away and the company fails.  An intersting part of this is that they have to be currently suffering irrperable harm. How will they prove this up?  They would probably have to show that they have actually lost revenue due to the activities of USocial.   If they are successful with this they could turn  TRO into a permanent injunction. That would  be end of USocial.  In a month somone will pop up to take their place.  As long as there is money to be made the Digg Cease and Desist lawyers will stay busy.

Scanning the wall posts of my Facebook friends can be a pretty good gauge of what people are doing for fun.   It is also a daily soap opera of “Days Of Our Lives” proportions. People expose their personal lives and inner most secrets to a level that would make people blush in the real world.  I constantly see relationships started, ended, and hearts poured out into the Web 2.0 world on a variety of subject.

Today’s Facebook  scan tells me that Sarah is no longer in a relationship and ready to get out with her single friends.  Amy thinks her guy is stepping out on her with a girl on his friends list.  She is thinking of creating a fake profile to trap him. (It’s not a secret now if he or any of his friends are on her friends list)  Lauren is “re-formatting” after having her heart broken.  Debbie changed her status from married to single. Her friend Jen did not even know her marriage was in trouble.  I also came across the following post on the wall of one of my friends.

“So evidently there is this new pick up line that guys are using it goes like this: ” hey so i would like to see you again” Me?  Yeah you! Want my number or do you have Facebook I can find you on there? I  laughed! That was the worst pick up line! it is sad that social networking has denigrated into  chickenshit dating! How sad! What is this world is coming to? WTF! “

Doesn’t her statement pretty much sum up Generation Y dating? For much of my dating life we did not even have cell phones. You had to ask for a home number. You took the risk of nosy parents, brothers and sisters answering the phone. You had to be on your game from minute one. How in the world did our parents get by?  Isn’t it amazing we are even here?  God forbid we should actually have to look someone in the eye when asking them out.

Now we are not even asking for phone number. We are asking for email addresses. We are asking for Facebook and Myspace pages. We are “texting our way to love“  For evidence of this look no further than my real life friends Monica and Hollywood movie star Alan. She live in Manhattan and he lives in L.A.  I recently wrote about my attempt at a “Facebook hookup” on their behalf.  You can read about their “textlationship” in the premiere episode of “Text In The City”.

We are advertising to the entire social networking world that we are on the market. We have started and ended and relationships on these same sites. We used to break up in restaurants so there would not be a scene. Now we find out for the first time when we see our boyfriend or girlfriend’s Facebook relationship status suddenly set to “single and looking” We try to contact them(on Facebook of course) and find we are now “blocked”. Relationship death by Facebook at its best. I would bet that within the 18-35 crowd there are almost as many relationships started and ended by text, email and social networking announcements than by an actual phone call. God forbid you have the guts to actually meet someone in person and talk about a future or lack thereof.

In my day, if you met a girl in a bar and she thought you were a total geek loser, the phone number she gave you was actually the phone number to Blockbuster Video. (I rented a lot of movies) For Generation X you got a phone number from The Rejection Hotline.(see video below) They have pre-recorded “rejection phone numbers to cover just about any scenario. Today, your blow-off is a girl giving you an address to her Facebook or MySpace page entitled:

“AMY’S MYSPACE REJECTION PAGE DEDICATED TO THE TOTAL LOSER GEEKS DOUCHEBAGS SHE MET IN BARS LAST WEEKEND.  IF YOU ARE VIEWING THIS PAGE YOU ARE A DORK! GET LOST!

When are we going to start seeing “wiki” personals and social networking sites where everyone who knows you basically creates your profile.  Would you have the guts to turn your social page into a “wiki” and let the masses collaborate on what your page should say?   A social wikipieda not geared at the facts of your life but at who you really are.  I envision a Linkedin type of dating where you solicit recommendations from your friends and they post them on  your profile.  For each verifiable recommendation you get a “date rate”.  The higher the “date rate” the more dateable your are.  The key would be that once you ask for the recommendation you can not change what they put on your profile good or bad. Of course like recommendations for any job interview you would probably not ask anyone who was going to put on your profile that you are a:

“mac-daddy” 30k millionaire with delusions of every one else’s grandeur” .

We have gone from “Dear John Letters” to “Dear John Phone Numbers” to “Dear John Texts” to” Dear John social networking pages.

I am definitely not naming my kid John. The odds are against him meeting someone right off the bat.

When all else fails, just Date or Dump Web 2.0 Style!

©2008 Brian Cuban

There is no right to Free Speech on Digg or any  privately owned social site.  They are a private entities to which the First Amendment does not apply.  Double standards and no standards are allowed.

A person using Digg for the most part has no usage rights with regards to the system other than simple access. That access is at the whim of Digg.   They can kick a you off for any reason or no reason at all regardless of Terms Of Service(TOS).  The reason they go into detail on what you can and can not do is to protect their legal remedies.  The TOS ensure that when Digg sues someone for bringing down their servers, they can point to the TOS to show the person knew what he did was wrong.  The TOS are there to protect Digg’s business model and comply with state and federal law.  They are not there to provide or protect content and speech rights to the Digger.

The recent controversy over the use of scripts is a good example. Scripts allow a person to bypass certain Digg protocols. A person can  digg through articles quicker than he could could using the system as it was intended. This can involve bypassing Digg protocols or simply replicating the human process so you do not have to be at your computer.  Scripts are not allowed for one basic reason.  Scripts put a strain on the Digg servers. This slows the service down for all.  If the servers are overburdened too much  they could go down.  That hits Digg in the pocketbook.  That has a negative impact on the Digg business model. It has nothing to do with fairness and all the other community chatter.  Digg has stated this to the community.

What about all the controversy over people allegedly banned over offensive Katie Couric comments  and other alleged edgy  commentary?   Does anyone really think Kevin Rose keeps tab on Digg commentary to be sure things are taken out he does not personally agree with?   That is ridiculous.  He does keep an eye.  He keeps an eye for speech that will hurt his business model.   Kevin is not in business to shape your speech or create the warm fuzzies in the Digg Community.  He is in business to make money.  His goal is to monetize Digg to the maximum extent he can.  His goal is to monetize it to the extent that it is an attractive purchase to a potential buyer. If he his doing his job every single thing that goes on in Digg every second of every day is based on that.  Every moment of every day at Digg should be “selling time”.   Digg is selling itself to its users but most importantly to the advertisers, media partners and potential buyers. He must convince them that Digg is not just a another social site that is fun but with no real world value.

Digg’s value is not as as a news distribution conduit.  There are a ton of those.  Digg’s value is as a social phenomenon.  Phenomenons can die in the blink of an eye.  They are difficult to monetize and sell for just that reason.   There are a lot of bankrupt tech visionaries investors and start-up guys  who can attest to that.  How does Kevin Rose monetize and take the Digg phenomenon to the next level?    Hopefully by doing whatever he can to show he can generate consistent revenue through advertising, Katie Couric type events and whatever else he can come up with to show others they can make money through his model.   It is not by taking some keen interest in Digg user spats unless those spats potentially drive dollars away.   It is not an easy task and not one particular to Digg.  Social sites such as Facebook face the same challenges.

So why does Digg ban  diggers who engage some types unpopular speech.  Lets take the Katie Couric example. Not too long ago Digg hosted a “Katie Couric Diggs The Conventions” bit done through a Youtube video.  Her digg submission stated:

“Hey Digg, I’d like to take some questions from the Digg community with me to the Democratic and Republican conventions. Submit a question in the comment section below. I’ll ask the newsmakers and politicians some of your questions in my online coverage from both cities, and during a live Webcast from CBS News and CNET. Thanks! Katie.”

Several diggers who posted some controversial comments allegedly had their accounts shut down. The comments were allegedly removed.   Does anyone really think it was because of the hate speech, censorship, or political leanings of Kevin Rose?   There is hate speech all over Digg ten times worse than was posted over Katie Couric.  The comments were removed  because Katie Couric reads those comments.  Katie Couric may get upset at those comments. Katie Couric may decided not to parter with Digg again.  Katie Couric may tell others of media note of her negative experience.  They will not want to come to partner with Digg.  I suspect Digg did some heavy marketing of that event to potential advertisers and partners.  If those  advertisers go away Digg loses money.   Digg is now worth less.  Kevin Rose is pissed.  Kevin Rose decides it is not in the interest of the Digg business model to allow that type of speech when it affects his ability to generate revenue and monetize his investment.  In my opinion that is why the Digg commentators lost their accounts. Their speech potentially took money out of Kevin’s pocket.

Lets  take a another look at the controversy over scripts.  People are required to not use scripts.  Digg is not required to boot people who use scripts. They can have a double standard.  Digg can allow some people they know are using scripts to stay and boot others at their discretion.  They are not required to be fair to the Digg community.  If they are unfair to the extent that revenue goes away they would certainly look at that and make adjustments. Rose may have very well have made that decision with regards to continued script usage. In any community whenever you have a large number of people complaining of the actions of a few there is generally a response by the community leaders. I however believe that if he has decided to crack down it is because they were becoming so prevalent it was having a pronounced  affect on the infrastructure and not because of any perceived unfairness in the community. Slow and crashing servers risk his business model.  I believe there will be some type of captch based system or similar safeguard implemented to slow down digging rates.

I suspect that advertisers and others who give their money to Digg could care less about scripts and other community squabbles  unless they affect the number of people looking at the content they pay Digg to promote.  I suspect that if there were stats showing that regardless of how unfair they are, scripts actually increase usership with no infrastructure issue Digg’s response to complaints bout their use would be quite different. Digg would simply morph into a different type of user experience.

Take the server  issue out of the equation.  If  I am Kevin Rose, before I start booting power users for scripts I am going to evaluate how that affects my business model.  The Digg community may not like to hear it but but power users who create heavy discourse help monetize Digg for the better.  When my brother Mark Cuban first bought the Dallas Mavericks and was fined 250, 000 dollars by the NBA he made the comment that the publicity he got from that fine when monetized well exceeded the amount of the fine itself.  While there is an art to determining where the line is crossed, the monetary value of bad publicity can far exceed good publicity because people expect good things to happen.  They talk more when bad things happen.  I suspect Kevin Rose is aware of this theory.  I do not know how he has evaluated it but there is certainly an argument that all of these  controversies such as top diggers using scripts or whatever increase the value of his investment.   He may of course have looked at it and decided that this is the type of publicity that in the long run hurts his investment but if it does not  why would he want to stop it?   If Digg was just about the pure form of anonymously distributing news across the internet Kevin would have been able to monetize his investment and sell long ago.  He is not in business to placate the Digg masses unless that placation increases the value of his investment or failure to decreases it.

Forget politics. Forget Babyman. Forget Conspiracies. Forget Scripts.  It is all about the Benjamins.

I have been banned from Digg.   I have been given a Digg death sentence with no reprieve. I have been banned after 30k diggs, 40+ front page submissions and 500 comments.

I first heard about Digg in September of 2007.  I had just started my blog The Cuban Revolution. I heard that Digg could drive traffic to my site so I signed up.  My motives were selfish.  I had no desire to share news. I wanted traffic. Self-promotion at its worst.  I had no concept of Digg friends, fans, algorithms, gaming, power digging, etc.   My first submissions were done with the innocence and ignorance of a two year old.  I dutifully added the Digg button to my blog and started submitting.    After a few months I was getting anywhere from 20-40 diggs for my submissions.  To para-quote Gordon Gekko:

“At time time I thought those were all the Diggs in the world…..”

This went on for months.  I then hooked up with fellow digger and now good friend LewP.   Lew took me under his wing.  He explained how Digg worked.  That is when I began to add friends.  I  also gained the understanding that submitting your own stuff was bad and having only your mutual friends digg your stuff was  not that helpful.   Several diggers  and I started an email group.  In this group we submitted and shouted each others submissions.   Front page postings from my blog skyrocketed.   Fifty percent of my blog submissions were making the front page. This meant tens of thousands of hits to my blog.  I was gaming the system for all it was worth.  This went on for a while.  Then the roof fell in.    Digg changed the way its algorithm worked.  Diversity of diggs became much more important in determining whether a submission made it to the front page.  Since smaller blogs tend to have a fixed following, it became twice has hard for me to get the diversity I needed for one of my posting to make front page.  I tried every possible variation to game my blog postings. None met with any real success.  I was emailing for shouts, instant messaging for shouts,  begging for shouts, singing for shouts,  offering free Dallas Mavericks tickets for shouts(not really).  In the end nothing worked.  My blog submissions would get 250-300 diggs without making front page.   Fortunately my early front page submissions had worked well for me in developing retained readership.

The most significant development for me in my short “Digg life” was when my post Why Athletes Go Broke went front page.  It was subsequently picked up by the Wall Street Journal.  This landed me two ESPN and a Fox News interview.   It also resulted in offers to write for publications.  None of it would have happened if it had not gone front page.

Once it hit home that I would no longer be able to use Digg to self-promote my blog I started doing it solely for fun and using it the way it was intended.  This is when I really got addicted and eventually fell to the dark side resulting in my ex-communication from the “Temple Of Digg”.   I was not looking for news to submit like many of the top diggers such as MrBabyman do.  When in the normal course of my news reading  I saw a story that interested me and looked like it might have a national appeal I would submit it.  While most of these submissions revolved around my brother Mark Cuban’s bid to purchase the Cubs and some off of his weblog  Blog Maverick I would also submit other stories of general interest.   I always got a kick when in the comments I would see complaints that my promotion of Mark’s material was tantamount to self promotion.  According to Alexa Blog Maverick is one of the most read non-commercial blogs on the web.  Mark does not need my help.

In doing the above, I built my “Digg credibility” which allowed me to add many of the top Diggers such as MrBabyMan and  MakiMaki. The rub was that in order to keep these top diggers interested in your submissions you have to Digg all of theirs.   This is only fair but becomes problematic within the Digg system if you do not have the time to sit in front of your computer digging all day.  I decided that I needed help to keep up.   While I heard rumors that there were diggers using scripts to speed up the digging process I had never given it much thought.  I knew that scripts were a violation of the Digg Terms Of Service (TOS).  There are many reasons they are not allowed.  The ethics based reason is that they defeat the intended purpose of Digg in being a news distribution conduit.  Scripts turn Digg into a “who is digging the most” contest.

I first experimented with Promote-My-Site. This is a web based system that allows you to do a timed auto-digg and auto- delete as well as a few other handy functions. The upside of this service is that it does not bypass any steps you would go through in the actual Digg process.   It therefore in theory should not raise any red flags that a script is being used.  The is extremely beneficial when you can not keep up with your incoming shouts.   You can set it a a 15 second delay, turn it on at night and let it digg and delete away. The downsides are that you have to pay for it and as of this writing it does not have a process to digg friends submissions pages.   It is therefore not digging the submissions of friends who do not shout such as MrBabyMan and MakiMaki.  I would still have to do those manually.   This however is a much less onerous process when incoming shouts are already dugg.   I used this service without incident for a while.  Then Darth Vadar(not his real digg name) appeared within Digg and introduced me to the dark side.   He gave me scripts that allows a person to bypass the normal two step process to Digg a story. It allowed me to skip a step  and digg a story directly from the submission page by creating a digg button on that page.  I began digging friends non-shouted submissions with reckless abandon.   I knew it was a TOS violation.  I didn’t care.   I was blinded by the sheer volume.  I was going to hit 500k diggs by the end of the year and change my Digg name to “The Cubanator!”  Hopefully there was also a free car or a set of steak knives for such an accomplishment.  It was working great.  My numbers and Digg ranking were rising rapidly.  In true contravention of what Digg is supposed to be about I do not think I read one story I dugg after I started using the script.  I was willing to sacrifice knowledge for speed. My “Digg bliss” was short-lived.  One day my account was gone. Shortly after it dissapeared I received the following email from Digg Support:

Hi from Digg.com,

We’re writing to let you know that your Digg.com account “bcuban” has
been banned for using unauthorized scripts to Digg stories from portions
of the site where no Digg buttons are provided. Specifically, our logs
show high Digging rates and activity from
digg.com/users/bcuban/friends/shoutsin and digg.com/users/bcuban/friends/submissions.

Using scripts is in violation of the Digg Terms of Use (digg.com/tos).
For your reference, we’ve bolded the section of our Terms of Use you’ve
violated below………

We will remove the ban from your account under the following conditions:
you re-read and re-affirm the Digg Terms of Use (response via email) and
agree to stop using scripts of any kind on the Digg.com website
immediately.

- Digg Support Team

I thought about pulling a “Michael Vick” with complete denial in the face of overwhelming evidence.   I decided to go with what in my mind was the less egregious route of feigning ignorance of the Digg TOS and promising never to do it again. I of course knew all along that I was violating  TOS and I knew they knew I knew.   I was simply in self-denial that I had become what I despised, a “Digg Whore” I sent them the following email in response: