Last week the social media world was shocked by the video of an English woman throwing a cat into a bin. The video was posted on YouTube and this woman became the centre of a media uproar. Now a week later and another movie has just appeared on YouTube showing a girl throwing puppies into a river in Bosnia. In fact this new video makes the ‘cat bin lady’ seem like an upstanding citizen. The outcry in the social media world has come quickly and strongly; in fact the response has been so extreme that the admin at Reddit is warning about social media users forming ‘lynch mobs’.

It is believed that the girl’s brother filmed her disposing of the puppies into the river. They both have managed to hide their identity so far, but the brother has posted that they did this heinous act in order to ‘protect their health’. At the moment there are hundreds of thousands of people across the social media world attempting to establish their true identity and it seems like only a matter of time before this happens. The response to the act has been even more extreme because of the glee on the girl’s face as she attempts to kill the puppies – she is not the kind of person you would probably want to meet in a dark alley.

It is worrying that people are willing to torture animals and then post it to YouTube – we really do live in a sick world. It would make you wonder if there is going to be more copycat acts; people looking for a bit of attention. There is no doubt that posting a video of yourself torturing animals would be a sure way of gaining at least five minutes of fame – sad but true.

Many long term users of Digg are currently in revolt against this social media site. It is being called the ‘digger revolt’ and it has come about due to recent changes made at the website. These changes mean that the site can no longer be controlled by a small group of users, but instead intends to be more inclusive. This change though has made a lot of regular users angry about their loss of control and they are currently attempting to harm the website in revenge.

The digger revolt does not involve any physical violence; Kevin Rose has not needed to go into police protection – at least not yet anyway. The revolt is more about trying to lure other users away to other social media sites like Reddit.com and posting articles critical of the new Digg. The protesters want things returned to how they used to be. At the start Digg was blocking a lot of the protest but it now seems to be just letting it flood the website; it is not nice to watch and is sure to damage the reputation of the site.

This current revolt is fascinating to watch and just goes to show how much power users have on a website like Digg. Maybe those in charge of social media sites like FaceBook should sit up and listen – if they push their users too far they too could be looking at a revolt. In this instance you have to feel a bit sorry for Digg though, they are only trying to improve the website and make it a bit fairer.  Digg had turned into an almost exclusive group of users who seemed to dominate everything – in some ways their current revolt can seem a bit childish; like a baby throwing their rattle out of a pram.

With the use of social bookmarking sites as a means of promotion, Delicious have been facing a lot of spam problem lately. Their goal of a community sharing the best websites on the internet turned to spamville overnight. People have been submitting links expecting the popular link juice.

With this, Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious, announced last 2007 in the SMX Conference that they are going to implement in the nofollow tag. This is to prevent people from submitting irrelevant links just for link juice. This may have stopped some from submitting spam links but it did not stopped all.

So now Delicious have resorted to another way of solving the problem and that is through silent bans. For those people who do not know what ‘silent bans’ mean, it is a way of banning by not notifying the person and rendering that person’s activity irrelevant to the system. This is what Brent Csutoras experienced which he shared on his blog on a post entitled “When Did Delicious Starts Silent Bans?“. According to his post, he saw his past bookmarks disappearing from the system as his new bookmarks are rejected. Here is how he relays his story.

Last week while I was attempting to bookmark a page, I noticed that my saved page did not show up in Delicious, outside of my personal bookmarks page. So if you were to look at the bookmark through Delicious, you would not see that I had saved it at all.

I have no idea how long this has been going on, as it appears that once you’re ’silent banned’ it removes all your previous activities from the system.

Brent Csutoras claimed that this is a rather familiar situation. It was not so long ago when Reddit did the same thing. A person who is silent banned submit a particular story to the websites but then the website does not react. It will not submit the story rendering the account of the person useless.

But one question comes to mind with all these things happening. Why do social bookmarking websites such as Reddit and Delicious have to resort to these informal ways of banning? Why do they keep the account but leave the user useless to the community?

Also, as Brent Csutoras wondered, what triggers the penalty? How can he, who rarely use his Delicious account get banned by Delicious?

I guess these are some questions that Delicious must answer in the next conference they are going to attend.