Image via CrunchBase

Digg has done a lot of interesting things over the years, but recently they did something that confuses me. First, they banned Zaibatsu, possibly the third most active user of Digg. A few days later they announced new funding for what they call international expansion. About one week after that announcement, they banned many of their most active users with minimal information on why. According to the user named Cosmicdebris, this is part of the explanation:

your Digg.com account has been permanently banned due to egregious violations of the Digg.com TOU related to script usage.

I find this flurry of activity a little too coincidental. If these users were using scripts to enable them to Digg better, then they have been using them for a long time. David Chen has a very good overview of what Digg has been doing. More importantly, he highlights what the problem might be:

At one point, Digg’s top 100 users were responsible for over 50% of Digg’s front page stories. This was Digg’s fundamental problem, although it didn’t have to be: It was an att