The Anatomy of a Digg Silent Bury

There has always been a shrowd of mystery surrounding the bury feature at Digg. What percentage of buries are necessary to put a story to rest? Are the different types of buries (lame, duplicate, spam) considered differently? Is there an internal bury system for Digg employees?

The latest in this series of questions that needs to be brought to light is what I call the “Silent Bury”. This is a unique set of circumstances where Digg removes the story from the listings (neither in upcoming or popular), but leaves the story on the site, and accessible via direct URL or search. This method effectively destroys the chance of a story succeeding, but does not seem to rely on the traditional bury methods that would also make a story difficult to access via search.

Example: A story which ran today quickly secured 18 diggs in the first 15-20 minutes. 3 hours later, the story has been removed from the Upcoming page, but not in the “hot in upcoming” or “popular” sections.

However, in checking to determine if the story has/had been buried, we were able to determine that, in fact, the story was still available via search without checking the “include buried stories”.

So, what is the purpose of this type of bury? Is it, perhaps, a honeypot to try and catch digg bots or spammers (ie: only people visiting the page itself could vote on the story)? If that were the case, a traditional bury would suffice.

So, what are the folks at Digg up to? Unless this is simply a bug, I see no reason for a story to undergo this particular treatment. Promote, Bury, or Delete should suffice. This seems to be a strange story pergatory.

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