In the intervening time I reported on a few cases of reverse gaming where people were using bury tactics to remove content similar to their own from the queue. This was very prevalent in the gaming sections of Digg as everyone was reporting on the same PS3/X-Box/Wii news of the day. I don't know if Digg took notice of the overt "bury-game" being played and I don't much care at this point.
What I'm about to tell you about is something else that I have recently discovered about Digg's anti-gaming algorithm.
It seems that Digg has decided (in their infinite wisdom) that if a user routinely digs content submitted by a friend they mark this as gaming. Yep, your friends can sink your content just as quickly as you submit it! What ends up happening is that Digg identifies what it considers to be gaming and, when you apply your dig to the story, it gets buried!
Now, this is not an instant bury, not at all. The way it seems to work is that if a story is dugg up by a majority of your (mutual) friends it will be buried as a gamed story. The rational appears to be that since only your (mutual) friends are digging it up it must be bogus.
This is wrong on so many levels!
As an aside, there are now certain sites (belonging to friends of mine) that, if I dig a submission targeting that site, the submission will get buried by my digging it! The opposite holds true as well in that there are certain digg members who can kill a link to hmtk dot com just as quickly!
I'm tempted to go in and remove all my friends from dig but I'm just too lazy for that amount of work!