Digg Deleting Stories and Users

I came across some really odd behavior at Digg.com involving what appears to be banned users. I'm not sure what's going, but it is very intriguing.

The Blackhole

One story in the Social Alerter database is logged as having 2604 diggs (which is why it caught my attention) and 255 comments. The story is supposed to be at http://digg.com/general_sciences/64_65_4 but browsing there gives a 404. It's a super-Digg and it's not found?

The story points to an image at tinypic, which is to say the least, mathematically wrong. It's a fun joke at best.

Digging deeper, Google does not have the page cached, but Yahoo! does (Yahoo! search). The cache shows a big warning of "The Content in this Article May be Inaccurate" and the story's title and description have non-ASCII characters. The comments count is 464 but oddly, the diggs count is 2408, i.e., less than what SA logged initially. This is also weird as SA logs the final digg count when the story goes popular and digg counts don't go down.

Luckily, Social Alerter logs Digg's own story ID (it's 5375057). So we can query the Digg API to see if it can tell us more info. No go: we get the usual 404 meaning that the story doesn't exist.

It gets better. The submitter's nickname is EinsteinAlbert. Browsing to the expected profile page at http://www.digg.com/users/EinsteinAlbert gives a 404. Actually, there is no trace of anything in the form of a profile for EinsteinAlbert. For example, browsing to digg.com/users/EinsteinAlbert/history/submissions to see the submissions also gives a 404.

But EinsteinAlbert definitely existed as Yahoo! lists many instances of the username at Digg.com (the query is: [site:digg.com EinsteinAlbert]), and even has the profile cached.

So What Does It Mean?

This is my theory: EinsteinAlbert got banned from Digg or got his/her account disabled.

If so, does that mean that Digg deletes the account profile AND the submissions of the user? Even if they're super-Diggs (albeit stupid)? If this is true, it won't be surprising: Digg needs to keep a strict anti-spam policy and policing millions of users is not easy.

What it means for us users is that we have to be super careful with our Digg user accounts.

What do you think? If you know of any user accounts that got disabled/banned on Digg, please give me a shout.