I remember Indymedia back in the days had the same problems of moderation, transparency and censorship. Indymedia is no company so you would assume that the problem might be even bigger with a profit oriented commercial service like Digg that earns money on its users.

One thing that strikes me is, that German sites get banned just for particiating in Digg. Many people just download the social bookmarking extensions for Wordpress although they write in english but when someone clicks the Digg button Diggers "bury" the stories for not being written in english.

You don't have to that because Reddit for instance has localized their service, in German among others.

Check out the German Reddit: http://de.reddit.com/

Anybody who wants me to share his knowledge of shortcomings of social media services can contact me. I am still in the process of evaluating many services for an article that will be most prabably published here.

Thank you for taking time to write this post. You summed up the problem perfectly. Muhammad (themulife.com) and myself (insidesocialnews.blogspot.com) discussed this at length. When it was brought up on digg, people mistook it for an attempt to slam digg. Oddly enough the digg submission was marked as accurate and buried when it was true and accurate.

I feel that if they would be more open about the moderating that they do, it would help the offending diggers know what they did wrong so they have a chance to fix it.

Digg does moderate, I know from experience through dialogue with their support team. They basically banned my account from posting a story they thought was offensive. Now my account has been suspended for 30 days as punishment. Too funny.