Recently, very active Digg.com users digging at a fairly rapid pace have been met with an error message advising them to slow down and actually read the story they’re digging.
An image of the message was dugg up to the front page. It reads:
“Whoa there cowboy! Itchy trigger finger? Digging so fast is lame. How about reading some stories instead?”
The subsequent commentary on the error message reveal others who’ve encountered it, and the running advice is to do what it says: space out time between diggs. Others reveal that the more often one sees the message the more “time out” is given to the user.
The answer may lie within speculation down the page where Diggers proffer it is an “Anti-MrBabyMan” filter. MrBabyMan’s claim to fame is his power-digger status. Recent protests and petitions revealed Digg unrest surrounding the leverage certain power-users had to vote up stories favorable to a particular Digg clique, to bury others, and to even replicate articles and submit them as their own.
Those replicated submissions often were more popular and more likely to reach the front page than the originals submission because of the connections and popularity of the person who submitted after.
Perhaps this is Digg’s attempt to cool those types of things down, or at least prevent people from blinding digging their friends’ submissions.
