It was about 2:00 in the afternoon, I was surfing the internet like I like to do at times (mostly digg.com) when I came across a digg submission. I was looking at the upcoming stories section, so this story had only about 2-3 diggs maximum at the time. There were yet to be any comments. I liked the story (actually I liked the website that was linked to, the story submission had little to do with the site to which it linked) so I dugg the story and decided to leave my props for the cool story. So I posted this:

I'm digging this because that site is pretty sweet. Never heard of it before. Thanks for that!

-Chandler Kent
http://www.chandlerkent.com

It seemed innocent enough to me. I have been on many forums/commenting locations and have left similarly formatted messages before without any problems. I continued surfing the internet, and then I decided to post to my blog. I wrote a story about the Stevenote and was almost finished when I received an e-mail from somebody I have never before corresponded with. It said this:

I know sometimes you digg and don't check back but you had better see what they are posting about you. It would make me worried...
Just concerned...
Cheers

I started to become concerned. What did he mean "you had better see what they are posting about you?" So I went back to that digg submission and saw immediately that my comment was dugg down to death. It had something like -300 diggs in less than an hour. I was shocked. What got everybody so pissed off? So I started reading some of the replies. This is what I saw:

Thanks for the spam!

Your site sucks balls.

apparently this kid was dumb enough to post his cell number..
555.555.5555
who wants to give him a call?

@ babemgnt101
I don't normally click on peoples shameless self site promotions. But I must say, your site is amazingly horrific to look at. Are you color blind?!

He blatently spammed his blog in here. His scrawny ass deserves to be hunted down and stalked by a 400lb prison escapee and fellow digger. Hey, it would make for a good story anyway.

Wow, I have a headache now. Not sure if it is from the colors of your blog or from reading all the replies to your spamming the board.

pop the toasters done. out pops babemagnet....

I was kind of upset at first. I didn't really understand why they were so mad at me, so I posted a reply:

Haha, wow thanks guys. So a few questions were posed. First of all, sorry about posting my website, it is just a habit and I do it on most forums. Second, that was my prom date from a while ago, not my sister or my girlfriend (don't be a player hater). I took down my personal info (thanks for the advice), I never really thought about it because nobody ever actually goes to my site (evidenced by the site design!). For everybody that buried me, I'm sorry it truly was accidental. Uhh yeah, have a good day.

I watched as I continued to get dugg down. Then the calls started (thanks to the guy who posted my phone number). Most of the people would just call, I would say hello and there would be silence. Mostly, I just hung up after about fifteen seconds of silence. I only waited that long because I was hoping somebody would actually do a cool prank, but you diggers disappointed me! Just lame people that didn't have the balls to say anything at all. I did get one guy who asked if my computer was running and I played along with his third grade humor. I got calls from New York City, San Diego, Silicon Valley, Kansas City, and some place in Florida (those are the ones I know because those people were not smart/juvenile enough to block their numbers). In all, I got about 30 calls from diggers. I also got a few Instant Messages (ironically one just popped up from johndev6 and I'm going to post his screen name because he called me a jackass! I will take it down when he apologizes). Most of the people that IMed were pretty nice and quite tame. I talked to this one guy for about half an hour and it turned out he only lived like 45 minutes from me. Crazy. (Here's another prank call coming in, let's see what they say...and another mute on the other end. You guys are so creative! BTW, Berkely or Oakland, CA.) One of the top diggers actually IMed me too. He was nice and said that he hoped the flaming I received didn't turn me away from using digg (it didn't). Thanks for that!

What did I learn from this experience? Well, that people can be completely stupid over the internet and they would never say half the things they say if they were talking to that person face-to-face. That is evidenced by how many of you called me and then said absolutely nothing. That shows a complete lack of character. It just proved something David Pogue said recently about online etiquette. However, I also learned that although the majority of people can be complete idiots, there are still many good people out there (like the guy who e-mailed me with a heads up and many of the people that IMed me). Of course, I also learned never to post your website, even in good measure (you could have just ignored it!) on any forum/comment board unless it is relevant to the post. Interesting, however, is the fact that in all the times I have done just that, I never got a response like I did.

Well diggers, thanks for the flaming. It was fun and I'm glad I could make some of your day. (Another call coming in...my God, a voice on the other line. Sounded like a nice guy, too! He was from Madison, WI.) As of this post I have a grand total of -1158 digg-downs and counting! Check it out:

Peace out diggers! And to all of you that don't like the site design and if you are graphic artist or whatever and do websites, e-mail me! I am only a coder! I am obviously not so good with the whole colors thing!

Update: So according to this guy, my comment was the most buried in history! I don't know how to feel about that...

Update 2x: This hit the digg front page! That's pretty ridiculous.

Update 3x: I can't go to bed because of all the excitement! 3:30 am here! This is crazy, wish I had some ads... ;P

Update 4x: This needed to be said:

I can totally see where this guy is coming from, prompting me to now make my first, and probably last, post on Digg. I just started reading Digg pretty recently, and it seemed like it was better then Fark's comments area, since for me anyway, I always felt like the article is only half the story, and the comments can often be way more interesting, a balanced pie chart of infotainment.
It's kinda sad that after only maybe 2 months, tops, on Digg I almost never read the comments anymore since they are seemingly always dominated by (insert an OS here) fanbois, internet tough guys, and just flat out raving assholes. Just a few entries below was an article about outrageous bank fees, and while I agree that bank fees are out of control, anybody that actually posted a comment indicating in any way that the person generating the overdraft might need to exert a little financial control was mercilessly and swiftly dugg down. "The wisdom of crowds" is pretty good at generating funny/weird/interesting stories for the first part of the infotainment pie, but the comments section generally reveals what common sense already tells you: crowds don't have any fucking wisdom, but make good mindless herds/lynch mobs.

Thanks Ouze!

Update 5x: Yeah so another update. Just got over -1300 digg-downs (that's what I'm going to call them!). This is pretty messed up (in a good/weird way).

Update 6x: We got on the top 10 list! Nice work.

Update 7x: Just got passed -1300 digg-downs again (many people dugg me up, then I got dugg down again)! Another milestone...again!

Update 8x: People still aren't getting it:

He got dugg down because it was a lame overenthusiastic comment with a website plug. Simple as that.

Well maybe he sees the paradox of this all:

I've gotten dugg down quite a bit for perfectly valid comments. I don't worry so much about it, it's digg -- it's not like digg will decide my future based on the score I get on a comment. What's weird, though, is when I post crappy comments that require no thought and aren't even very sensible, I get dugg up. Or when I post something, trying to be funny, and eeeeverybody takes it seriously and diggs me down.
But oh well, I don't care. It's not my future, or my life, it's a digg post.

Update 9x: Starting to lose count of updates! Just got past 1000 diggs (thanks pooptart)! And Eric just sent me this. Thanks Eric! (Notice the digg-downs. 1337!)

Update 10x: Made it to NUMBER 1 on the Top 10 list. Awesome-ness right now. Still can't sleep. 5:02 am! I love you all.

Update 11x: One of the diggers that I was just chatting with brought up an excellent point that I thought should be mentioned here. The only reason that you are all here right now is because I got dugg down a massive amount of times. The question is: why did I get dugg down so much? Was it that my comment was so "idiotic" or such "spam" that so many people felt compelled to click the little red thumb? I don't think so. It's all about how the comments are set up in digg. I got dugg down, so my comment got grayed out. I kept getting dugg down because I was the first comment (purely by chance). Then, as more people came they are attracted to a dimmed out gray bar that has a huge number of digg-downs on it. So what do they do? They open the comment, read it, and then continue to digg it down. Digg should change this system to reward the people with good (dugg-up!) comments. Right now, all attention is brought to the dugg-down comments since they are grayed out. Instead, color the good comments, not the bad ones. Then things like this wouldn't happen. Just a thought! (Note: I am not complaining however!)

Update 12x: Well everyone, I am finally going to bed. Looks like I hit a wall. If anything happens when I am sleeping that you feel is worthy of posting here, please e-mail me at ckentster@gmail.com. Thanks and keep diggin'!

Update 13x: Good morning everybody! Let's just say that was possibly the worst sleep I have ever had, what with the excitement and everything. I woke up with like 25 IMs and 36 e-mails (6 voice mails, 3 with nothing but silence, I guess I asked for it!). Thanks to everybody who wrote/continued to call. Most of you had very kind things to say (but you still don't like the site design! It is being worked on.). A lot happened while I was sleeping. The digg story went to almost 3000 digg and the original story I "spammed" on got almost 10,000 diggs. My comment got dugg-down (I DO realize it's called buried but where is the creativity in that?) almost 1500 times and I imagine it would have been a lot more if so many people didn't go and digg me up. A lot of you asked why my site isn't going down? Well I host with GoDaddy and that seems to be doing good (thankfully). Also, a lot of you were curious about the site stats. Well on January 4th, my site had 97 page requests (I was probably 90 of them). Yesterday on January 5th, this site received 25,000 page requests! That's a major increase. Here is a chart of the day-to-day increase:

Even more revealing is an hour-by-hour chart:

Thanks to everybody that visited! I truly had no idea any of this would happen when you "spam" the digg comments. Go figure!

Update 14x: A lot of you have taken me up on the offer of attempting to redo the color scheme on this site. To speed up the process (and offer it to anybody else as well) I am posting the stuff you will need here. You can e-mail the submissions to me at ckentster@gmail.com if you like. Thanks again!
Download the code
EDIT: I have created a contest of sorts for people that want to redo my site design. Check it out here

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Chandler is a 19 year old college student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He is currently in his freshman year and double majoring in Computer Science and Software Engineering with a minor in…… Spanish. He enjoys computers, music, and sports (not in that order) and plays baseball with the school. His computer of choice (not of use) is an Apple, probably the iMac. Some might call him an Apple Fanboy, but he prefers Apple Worshipper. Born in southern Wisconsin he was raised in Antioch, Illinois where he still resides during breaks from school and summers. He enjoys having a good time and just hanging out. « less more »

Thank you for visiting ChandlerKent.com. We are a technology blog that covers all things that have to do (or not) with technology. Nothing that is said here is guaranteed to be factual or even in the remotest bit true. Thanks again for visiting and have fun browsing!

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me using the link above.

This site was opened on November 30, 2006 and is run by Chandler Kent and a few of his friends. All material, opinions, images on this site belong to us. Please contact us if you have any questions about using any material presented here.

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