Why Does Digg Hate Porn?

2008_01_03_digg.jpg(See update below.) Fans of the Digg phenomenon know how valuable it is for any site to get a link featured on the social bookmarking behemoth. That’s why our fellow Gawker Media siblings are constantly sending out emails asking us to check out their Digged stories … emails that we immediately delete. You see, to us gentle pornsmiths, a Digg button is little more than a useless hunk of code, one that automatically rejects any submission deemed “obscene” or “pornographic”—i.e., any link that includes Fleshbot.com as part of the URL.

That fact alone wouldn’t bother us so much if we didn’t then have to sit on our hands as Diggers bestow link love on all kinds of racy material from more “respectable” sites. For example, recent front page winners on Digg included a link to Terminator fuckbots that we featured here a while back (before it became a traffic bonanza for our geeky brothers at Gizmodo—and don’t even get us started on that doggie sex toy post .) The point is that we often engage in some good, relatively harmless fun that the Digg community obviously enjoys, yet we aren’t allowed in the the front door because we’re “one of those” sites.

2008_01_03_fox.jpgNow, we don’t expect folks to start linking to our daily hardcore Flesh Flicks videos or anything … but surely there must be some middle ground where porn lovers and folks with generous workplace filters can live in harmony. True, there have been several attempts to emulate the Digg model for adult sites, but they’ve all come up short.

Still, people love Digg and Digg lovers like sexy stuff. They helped earn a reprieve for that Fox News Porn parody after it was famously banned, other links submitted with “porn” or “extremely NSFW” in the headline do just fine … and if you check out the “Best Of” lists from any of our sister sites, the most popular items (with or without Digging) are frequently sex related. So why can’t we play along too?

2008_01_03_dogs.jpg
Of course, cynics might say that this very post is just another shameless attempt to bait Digg and score some sweet hot pageview love of our very own. (And they’d be right—too bad we can’t Digg this link.) Just don’t tell us that you didn’t want to share that Jesus fuck doll ad with all your friends in the 2.0 world. Even if stuff like that is probably what got us banned in the first place.

· Digg Terms of Use (digg.com)

Update: Those techie suck ups at Valleywag respond to our reasonable request.

Related (sorta):
· “Hotdoll: The Sex Doll for Dogs” (the most popular story of 2007 @ Gizmodo)
· In SF, Third Breast Is More Common Than Third Eye (io9)
· “The Top Five Reasons Digg Is Completely Useless For Finding Anything Related To Music” (Idolator)
· “All You Need to Know About Digg” (Gawker)
· “Denton to pay bloggers based on traffic” (Valleywag)

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Previously: Is Fox News Too Hot For TV?, Hot Hexadecimal Dildo Porn: Digg This!, Dig for Porn, MoSexIndex, Splutr: More Social Porn, Fantasti.cc Videos: Community Rated Smut, Porn 2.0: Haven’t We Been Here Before?

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  • Lux Alptraum

    Duh, Digg hates porn because Digg users don’t want to go to hell. Keep your filthy smut away from chaste Digg, you smut peddler!

  • BLAKELEY

    So why can’t we make a Digg for porn? Denton? Can you get tech on this?

  • Megan Carpentier

    Also, my post last week that showed disturbingly graphic post-suicide bomber gore got to Digg’s front page. So, racy is good and dismembered bodies are cool, but fuckbots and doggie sex toys are not? Ahh, double standards. So satisfying.

  • Lux Alptraum

    @BLAKELEY: Creating a Digg just for porn basically means reinforcing the idea that porn needs to be kept separate from “polite” society.

    Lame.

  • BLAKELEY

    @luxnightmare: @Anonymous Lobbyist: Yeah but I don’t want to be jackin’ it and see some blood/guts/gore… I mean like if you’re into that sorta thing that’s fine but like, wouldn’t it be great to be not part of regular Digg?

    We could call it “Porgg”…

  • Anonymous

    how about “pigg”

  • BLAKELEY

    @crabbypattylover: That was my first thought… then I was like, I didn’t want it to just be about bbw.

  • Jonnobot

    @everyone (but mostly Blakeley) – as Dash said in the post, there’s already been several attempts at creating Digg-like sites for porn, all of which suffer from a chronic lack of users. so creating a new one, even with the magic Dentonite touch, isn’t really the solution we’re looking for.

  • BLAKELEY

    @jonnobot: I’ll just have to stick with Fleshbot then! Make you guys do all the work for me!

  • Violet Blue

    fyi, just had the same problem with Digg, with a twist. they posted and Dugg my Top Ten Sexy Geeks 2006 no problem (with lots of digging). but this year when users tried to submit my 2007 list, my site was banned as one of “those sites”. the twist? Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, was on the 2006 list.

  • Violet Blue

    doh, here’s the list if you want to see how *nasty* it is:

    [tinynibbles.com]

  • Richard Blakeley

    @Violet: Huh? How is having Kevin Rose on the list a twist? I don’t follow… sorry I’m slow.

  • Jonnobot

    (i think she meant her own problem with Digg had a twist, not her list itself.
    get with the program, Blakeley!)

  • wiseblood

    To throw in my 2 cents. My website: http://www.theblogblog.net has also been banned from Digg. We love fleshbot and label all of our links NSFW. We were really benefiting from Digg for more than just sex related diggs. We have since removed the Digg This link from our posts.

  • greenfday6

    Already a digg for porn out there. Fapp.com needs users but looks great.

  • Lux Alptraum

    @blakeley: The twist is that Digg was okay with a list of sexy geeks when it included Digg’s founder, but not so much when it was other people.

  • BigT42

    I can sympathize. I submitted what I thought was an innocuous story to Digg that Fleshbot referenced and my account was disabled. I’ve seen plenty of things make it to the front page that was much worse than what I submitted, with no consequences for the submitter. They did reinstate me when I asked nicely, however.

  • BigT42

    @Blakely
    Kevin Rose is the founder of Digg. Violet is saying that her list was OK with Digg only if Kevin was on it.

  • Gracie Passette

    Digg et all do not hate porn or adult content; they fear it.

    There have been many attempts to create adult Digg-type sites, but they haven’t the same pull/success (mainly because porn users are more sophisticated and/or specific, know how to use a search engine, and also admit to enjoying non-smut).

    But Luxnightmare is correct; we don’t need further divisions anyway.

    I’ve been Digged (Dugged?) and never found it to be the big deal it’s supposed to be, mainly because the comments/ratings are not the sort of dialogs I like ~ anyone can rant, flame and mock, and it only serves to lower your link rating and public opinion of sex in general.

    I’d say more, but I’ll rant properly at my own damn blog. ;)

  • Anonymous

    Digg sucks

  • Come a little Miroslav Klose You’re My Kind of Man

    @BLAKELEY: @luxnightmare: Actually, with the might of Gawker Media behind him, I would think that Denton could compel the Diggers to acquiesce to Fleshbot getting the same diggable planets as the Gawker sibs. But maybe not for the end-of-day “Fleshflick” (of which it would appear the editors are favourable).