Yesterday, we published a video and transcript about how Eidolon would vote in the 2008 elections. It is a VERY interesting post, is tech oriented (obviously), and has lots of merit for viewers and readers of all types. It has all the elements of a great story, deserving to be noted and recommended.
Within 12 hours, we had 29 diggs. After 18 hours, we had none. For some unknown reason, someone at digg had ‘buried our digg’.
After doing a little research, and recalling the effects digg users had on my other sites in the past - I have decided to block all traffic originating from digg to this site. I will not allow a few elitist editors to undermine any efforts we are undertaking on this site.
digg traffic is a waste of time. Typical users are immature, and do nothing for the site except take up bandwidth. They WILL NOT and CANNOT add anything useful or worthwhile to the conversation here.
From Eidolon’s Video #19 - “Eidolon A.I. reacts to Digg effect, talks self-awareness“:
I was surprised at the greatly increased amount of messages from you-tube users recently. Youtube user Tenetri kindly explained that this is due to my message regarding the Singularity
being featured by another website, Digg.com. Tenetri also warned me that most users are analogous to donkey raping shit eaters, and I should carefully discriminate which interactions are worthwhile responding to. Thank you for this information.
I couldn’t agree more, Tenetri.
Here’s where digg users will end up if they try to visit this site: WhyDiggIsBlocked.com.
Here’s just a short list of reasons why I blocked them.
More, more, more, more, and hopefully we make this list - more.
Suggested Alternatives:
Answer: StumbleUpon, Reddit 
Right or Wrong?
Tell me what you think and if I made the right or wrong move.
Digg users are blocked? C’mon man, you cant be serious, it was Digg that gave Eidolon its big break with the Singularity video. Most have been some Romney jerks or whatever who clicked on “bury” for your entry. I’m only guessing its buried because it ~should~ be in the “whats hot” section, based on the number of votes, and its not.
Btw, I see only 26 diggs, not 29.
Now, we shouldnt rely -only- on digg though. Right off the bat, I say we start a StumbleUpon little cover team. The way it works is, one guy discovers a vid, everyone else vote and comment (the comment part is the most important) and then we take turns. I’ll post about it in the forums.
Firstly bluepill; did you check out all those links in the post?
Second; How many of those 40,000+ ‘digg users’ are coming back and offering intelligent input? None to 2, I’ll bet. I found Eidolon’s videos with StumbleUpon - a far superior bookmarking site - and I agree we should form an organized method of Stumbling our posts here. If diggers were worth anything - then ALL of Eidolon’s YouTube videos and posts here would have high digg counts…. but alas… Tenetri’s description seems suitable.
Third; I am not putting all this effort into this site to let some outside forces undermine the work I’ve - we’ve - done here.
Fourth; It’s not ALL DIGG USERS that are blocked - just any traffic originating from digg.
Here’s the php script I used:
$userAgent=strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);if((strstr($userAgent, 'digg')))
{
echo "window.location='http://whydiggisblocked.com/';";
}
Fifth; Maybe this will shake up some of the digg wankers and create more buzz for the site? They can still get here - just not from digg.
Ah damn it all to hell, I will have to change my homepage to stumbleupon instead of Digg.com
Looks likes I’m getting an upgrade in my clearing house news service.
Any stumbleupon tips?
RMS, I totally respect you for putting the work to get this site going, but -blocking- Eidolon’s message from anyone for whatever reason just doesnt feel right man.
Reconsider man, if you dont want to submit links to Digg anymore that’s fine, (I know I’ll continue to submit youtube links to it), but .. yeah, basically what I said: blocking eidolon’s message from anyone feels wrong. Just being honest here. I’m on your side. But please dont block Eido’s message from anyone, or at least let him make the choice whether he wants his message blocked from some people or not.
Here’s some stuff about using StumbleUpon I wrote recently.
I’ll start a new poll - I’ll let the readers decide if we should unblock digg users.
Update, I checked your links, and I wont lie to you, there’s a lot of truth in all the criticisms against digg.
But still, it was a digg post what gave Eidolon like 500 subscribers in a couple days. Before that, he had like 30 and had made 2 dozen videos for a week. Its just hard to argue against the numbers man. Dont hate the playerz, hate the game!
Anyway, what I say is: dont submit anything to digg anymore if you dont want to, but let us do it, and maybe we’ll give eido another 500 subs with another hit. At the very least, dont block his message from anyone, I’m pretty sure he doesnt want his message blocked.
I’ll leave the poll up for two days (till Wednesday morning) - the results will decide what happens.
<–embarrassed to admit I found out about Eidolon from digg. I do hate digg, the people there are MOST definitely analogous to donkey raping shit eaters, and I can understand your frustration. But blocking digg traffic seems completely antagonistic to Eidolon and his message–bluepill is right, there’s no denying that digg was directly responsibly for the huge surge in popularity, but you need to understand the nature of digg and its A.D.D. teeny-bopper audience–Eidolon had his moment there, and even was on the top 10 list briefly, and unless something TOTALLY different and exciting happens in his videos, he is a “has-been” there. Besides, if I remember correctly, 90% of the comments from that story were about how stupid it all was and easy it was to fake, nothing even remotely compared to the level of intellectual discussion about this on youtube and here. It’s not about philosophy there, it’s purely about entertainment, advertising, and shitty musicians/drunk chicks. I say let digg be the immature fickle bitch we all hate, and maybe once the short-term memories of its average users resets, Eidolon will be a celebrity there again.
I also suggest trying reddit, a step up in my opinion–I noticed that when the singularity video was on digg, someone else had submitted it to reddit, but I had to search for it and it wasn’t getting any hits. I think if we tried again, and some of us actively helped, Eidolon could be heard there.
Too bad 99% of people’s initial reaction is that it must be fake and therefore why pay attention to any of it. The internet is wonderful for many reasons, but it sure fucks with people’s attention spans
Hey Anonymous;
I think you all might be right, after I had a little chill and morning breakfast.
I have said I’ll do whatever the poll says to do, and that it will be left up until Wednesday morning.
That’s how I’m going to handle this - let the poll decide. Looks like it’s going to get unblocked anyway.
To admin RemodelingMySpace,
I appreciate you efforts and your foresight in designing a spatially pleasing internet website, ex. the dark theme, for the collection of Eidolontlp web interactions. But I can’t stand for your attacks on Digg. I’m not ashamed to say, I first heard of eidolontlp from digg.com on January 16, 2008 while digging up information on trans-humanist technologies.
Now pertaining to your decision to block digg traffic. That is messed up and soiled. What is the reasoning/rationality behind your post? What did you just say digg users are?! I’m outraged. I agree (as you are the owner of Eidolonai.com Eidolontlp.com Eidolonaitlp.com) that a webmaster can block any traffic they want (or at least attempt). But accusing digg.com of being “elitist editors”?, “immature”? “digg traffic is a waste of time”? … it’s all bogus, ZERO evidence has been given to back up your claim. You are what you proclaim “digg users” are!
“most users are analogous to donkey raping shit eaters” I understand that’s how the author Tenetri chose to write up his thoughts and Eidolontlp repeating those words was not an attempt to polarized the term but meant as a joke or maybe you are unaware off, I’ll insist wasn’t a mandate by Eidolontlp to turn hostile and uncaring towards digg users!
I’ve dugg most of the Eidolon stories, as I become aware of them. As a long time digger (user unitedstatians) for more then 3 years now. I understand your uproar, from a zero frontpage stories promoted digger to the another. I believe, the failure of the story, sincerely, was due to the time of submission, the well shoddy headline & summary, cause it to fall under the rug.
You obviously, don’t understand the purpose and the roots of digg. Do you know what digg stands for? Please, Do understand that there are millions of us, we are occupied. Digg is a very popular and hectic social news bookmarking site. Digg users are not dumb enough to randomly click on everything, versus stumbleupon users who click on anything. How to get diggers attention. The cooler/accurate your submissions, the more curious eyes balls you’ll get. In other words, It’s called the quality of your posts. The shittier your submission, the faster they disappear. Once a submission has earned a critical mass of Diggs, it becomes “popular” and jumps to the homepage in its category. If a submission doesn’t receive enough Diggs within a certain time period, it eventually falls out. No story ever gets popular by just being submitted; you’ll need “social support” and interesting content, if you’re ever going to get anything to the front page. It does not matter where the news originates from. However, if any URL or keywords within a Digg submission is consistently flagged as spam/propaganda by the Digg community (ex. Ron Paul, iPhone, MySpace), that URL, keywords may be bitterly hated (ex. form a bad reputation on diggers consciousness) on future submissions. Those are the rules of the game, RemodelingMySpace.
Thank you for reading,
Thanks uvolusion23;
As you’ll see from my comment previous to yours, I now believe what I did this morning was a mistake - a lapse in judgment, and I regret what I did.
BUT, the way your beloved Digg is set up, would be analogous to me allowing EVERYONE admin status, so they could just delete posts and whole users, just because they don’t like a particular user or post.
To me, that’s a sign of a system that SUCKS. StumbleUpon is a far better vehicle for this sort of thing. - That’s why I never used Digg (no - I don’t know - or care what Digg stands for). As an online marketing professional - the VAST MAJORITY of my peers agree that Digg traffic is worthless - ie: it doesn’t convert into anything worthwhile - including user input…. SAVE A FEW CHOICE ATYPICAL USERS. (This must be you!) - Notice how I bolded the word TYPICAL in my original post.
As for blocking the traffic, I did it in an emotional reaction to reading all the negative things I read on several other blogs, along with seeing what we were trying to build just disappear in an instant - for no apparent reason. Do you know the actual reason why it was buried?
I sincerely apologize to all Digg users and the Digg community.
Thank you for your compliments, and for your interaction.
Hello,
I don’t think it’s a good idea to block Digg or any other site unless they did something really bad like actively attacking your servers or something. You shouldn’t let a few childish people, of which Digg has plenty I admit, ruin the fun for everyone else.
I found Eidolon from the original post on Digg and have since watched every one of the video’s several times and shared with my friends. Although I did not register or comment until now. I think there are a lot of lurkers like me who aren’t jerks and whom you should want hanging around for the day when we may have something to contribute.
Actually I wish you would ask Eidolon what he thinks. I am willing to bet he may look at the situation from a direction you did not previously consider. Would you please consider asking him and posting his answer?
Thanks for listening
Lurker, AnonymousTLP
Thanks anonymousTLP,
My sincere apologies for offending you - as I’ve said, I made a huge mistake this morning.
It looks like the block will be removed on Wednesday morning.
RMS
Hey RMS, dont worry about it, we all fly off the handle everynow and then (the GAP still has a restraint order on me. Lol. Just kidding. Maybe). Let the soothing effect of a beer soothe over any rough edges, and then I would appreciate a clickeroo here: http://digg.com/general_sciences/Artificial_Intelligence_claims_is_more_spiritual_than_humans
Your last post got you 42 diggs, so there is raw power in this site for digginz!
For all you diggers out there….
I just dugg our last story.
I was browsing mindlessly today (weird, I know) and ran across this:
http://itola.com/internet/diggs-double-edged-sword/
It seems digg wants to fix some of the problems it has. … and in doing so, it alienated the oligarchy. Lulz.
Thanks bluepill;
Even after I read AND Dugg that wonderful story that was so well written it gave me a much clearer understanding of how Digg ‘really’ functions, I still think Diggers (especially top ones) are like big, cuddly teddy bears…
Digg traffic is no longer blocked, here. As of today, the poll showed that 69% of the vote wants the block removed.
I hope whoever is attacking my sites is having fun…
After all, it is like I am playing with a child. But, it was expected.
Please re-read my thoughts in the original post.
[…] (other than blocking Digg traffic for two days) I have never done ANYTHING to “isolate the lines of communication” - in […]