Delicious has long been known for their outward dislike for search marketers and even went as far as to nofollow the ENTIRE site a while back to deter any potential use of Delicious as a marketing tool.
Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious, spoke at the first SMX Social Media conference in 2007, and said that they had implemented the nofollow tag because they had no mechanism in place to prevent spam and needed someway to prevent people from trying to abuse Delicious.
“If you believe in collective memory and collective voting, why nofollow links? Because they are trying to discourage spam. Danny Sullivan wonders if it actually is a deterrent. They say yes. And if they could eliminate spam other ways would they get rid of the nofollow? They said maybe, but they think that having nofollow keeps away the motivation for spamming.” – SearchEngineLand
However, while they may not have had much in the way of spam prevention a year and half ago, they seem to have a few tricks up their sleeve now.
Last week while I was attempting to bookmark a page, I noticed that my saved page did not show up in Delicious, outside of my personal bookmarks page. So if you were to look at the bookmark through Delicious, you would not see that I had saved it at all.
I have no idea how long this has been going on, as it appears that once you’re ‘silent banned’ it removes all your previous activities from the system.
For those of you not familiar with the term ‘silent ban’, it is when a site effectively bans you without letting you know or giving you any indication that your actions on that site no longer have any value. The only other site that I know of that uses ‘silent bans’ is Reddit.
I should note as well, that I do not spam or really use Delicious much at all. So I am a little curious as to what triggers the penalty.
I would be interested if anyone else has some information on this. If so, please comment below.
Want me to submit this page to Delicious? 🙂
Hah…
Silent bans are the most practical approach for most sites to control abuse.
I used to work for a scientific publishing site which had a problem with "non-scientists" who wanted to submit papers. Some of them submitted appeals to a university's board of regents, the national science foundation, the united nations, and other organizations that didn't want to get bothered.
A person who knows that he's ban has a number of remedies available from a complaint to customer service, complaints on blogs as well as technical countermeasures. People who want to do the latter particularly need accurate information about what works and what doesn't work that they can feed back into their efforts
It's much easier, if you can, to put people like that in their own personal matrix that obscures what's happening to them. Once they realize that they're not getting results and that they don't understand why, the majority of them will move on and abuse somebody else's service.
A big part of me agrees with you… The other part who knows that users who are not spamming or promoting are ending up banned and therefore wasting their time using a site that doesn’t count their actions.
Social sites have a lifecycle. Early on the problem is to get people to participate — later on the problems are to (i) control operating costs and (ii) prevent burnout.
(a) Blight is one mode of burnout. Another one is that (b) the cost of become an active participant of the site becomes too high to attract new participants, and another is that (c) a site develops an editorial voice that "turns off" potential new readers. Digg is struggling with both (b) and (c), while Reddit is struggling with (c).
You can talk about fairness until you're blue in the face, but the fact is that MrBabyMan needs Digg more than Digg needs him. There are hundreds, no thousands, of people who can do what MrBabyMan does, but only one site that can deliver the audience that Digg can. MrBabyMan is free to move to Reddit or Mixx, but it's going to be a big step down.
Although we're all seduced by the big traffic pulses that we can from social media, there's some truth in Aaron Wall's characterization of social media as a sucker's game — so long as they are running a free service, you can't expect it to be fair.
It's a well known Del.icio.us tactic.
In a talk in 2006 Joshua Schachter said: "When you’ve figured out someone is spamming, don’t let them know – let them keep posting and just silently junk their stuff."
nda
Paul I can assure you there is more to "social media" then 34k pageview blasts from the homepage of 4 different websites on the Internet.
If you really do feel it is a suckers game then carry on 🙂
This is a good feature only when it works for it's intended use. If you silent ban users that want to submit good quality information than your system has a serious flaw which can inadvertently hurt your business model.
Hmmm i totally agree with Nick he explained every thing very beautifully and the point which is HURT YOUR BUSINESS MODEL is very wright …..