Your amusing recursion hack has just had a practical consequence:

you inadvertantly caused the smoking gun proving Digg censors

stories on the front page. Your link actually made the digg

front page, according to the rss feed used by sites like popurls:



http://popurls.com/



but it's been censored from the actual front page.



This also shows an unexpected consequence of feeds: you can't

get away with censoring your site, unless you have some kind of

delay in the feed.



This afternoon I decided to play a little joke on Digg and Reddit by submitting a story about recursion that pointed from the Reddit story to the Digg story and back. Since Digg URLs are totally predictable it was possible to set this up by writing the Reddit story first (and they don't verify that URLs work) and then posting the correct Digg story with the Reddit link (which I couldn't predict).It's a classic programmer joke (it's even in the Digg Programming section).And for that my Digg account was cancelled without warning.You can start the recursion at Digg here But Digg folks, get a life, ok? It was a joke, a classic programming joke. And this from a guy who's a 'dark tipper' (scary music).A well informed reader writes to me:So I looked into this and sure enough the story is buried. If you try searching on Digg for 'reddit recursion' you get no results , but if you look at the main RSS feed my story is there as #2 on the front page. Yet on the actual page the story is not there.In the RSS feed it appears between "Bug or Conspiracy? Digg users go CRAZY modding down comments!" and "Metallica finally joins iTMS". I'll email anyone a copy of the RSS feed showing my story.And finally the number of stories promoted to the front page for user jgrahamc (my now dead account) just dumped from 1 to 2... I guess my silly recursion story should be on the front page but it isn't. This appears to be because members of the Digg community buried the story because they didn't like it, but Digg has no mechanism for showing when a story is buried.

Labels: rants and raves