During last week's Gmail scare, when a large number of users could not access their account, three stories about it hit Digg's front page. Each one, after just a matter of minutes, was buried. The stories were enough to confirm that a lot of other people were having the problem, which is more than Google would admit, but they never gained enough momentum to be picked up by larger sites (here is one exception) or to get to the point where Google was compelled to say something about it. The posts:

1. Gmail not working for a lot of users
2. Large-Scale Gmail Outage Happening Right Now?
3. Gmail errors lets users pissed off today

So why was each promptly pulled from Digg's front page? From what I can tell there could be a number of reasons:

1. The second and third were technically duplicate stories
2. A lot of people did not have a problem with their Gmail and...
   1. did not think the story affected them
   2. did not realize just how many people were affected
3. People did not think a Gmail outage was newsworthy (same goes for the Google Apps outage)
4. People assumed Gmail would be working again shortly so the story was a non-issue
5. The third item's title was grammatically incorrect

With all the recent news of Digg's Bury Brigade and questions concerning the equality of individual users, it is disappointing to see what is essentially the same story be promoted three times only to be pulled each time. We have no way of knowing who was doing the burying, but enough people clearly were interested in the story that it was worth some attention. Readers certainly have the right to vote for or against a story, but an instance like this makes it clear that a potentially small group of people can undo a story that is a few hundred votes in the making. Recent changes to Digg's algorithms mean that the promoting and burying of these stories were not caused by any sort of suspicious group activity but it cannot prevent questions about just how democratic the system is or just how much impact each user has. As much as Digg has progressed, it still has a long way to go before what we are seeing on the front page is indicative of the importance of a story or even of the users' interests.