Blog Engage Bans Number 3 Contributor
Last week, several leading members of the the social media site for bloggers, Blog Engage were shocked to discover their accounts had been deleted along with all of their posts, comments and votes contributed. One of the most active supporters, David Leonhardt ranked at number 3 by Blog Engage was included in the bannings.
Blog Engage is a “community” for bloggers, a much smaller operation than Digg, but reminescent of the large scale Digg bannings that occurred not long before Digg v4 and the decline in traffic. Many recall the controversy surrounding Digg’s ban of its number 2 user, Zaibatsu for what was arguably a technicality beyond the users control.
In this screenshot Clickfire obtained from the Google cache, David Leonhardt’s Blog Engage stats confirm his investment in the site. If one could estimate it takes 1 minute to submit a story for voting, his time spent contributing would be a little over six hours. This doesn’t include the over one hundred comments and thousands of votes.
Why did Blog Engage ban Leonhardt? Leonhardt and other Blog Engage users ponder the question in a blog post about the social media “fail.” Unfortunately, no definitive conclusions have been reached or communication received from the owner of Blog Engage as to why the banning took place. At first, it appeared it was a technical issue as Mr. Leonhardt and the owner of Blog Engage reportedly had a friendly channel of communication. However, there seems to be at this date, no answer.
One Blog Engage user speculated that the owner was not merely joking when he remarked:
“Yeah great idea for an article, now I know who to ban and not ban at blog engage haha Joking guys! At the end of the day we have to find what works best for us. If you have the right people working for you and you pay well all these ideas can be successfully implemented.”
We couldn’t help but note the irony in the Blog Engage Twitter account description that states:
…Build your Backlinks with our RSS Services, Increase SEO, Comments, Traffic, Readers, and Build your Brand
Disclosure: the owner of Clickfire also had an account deleted at Blog Engage.
December 12th, 2011
Hi Emory, It’s a little frustrating because I spent time networking on the site and got banned myself, but I wown’t lose any sleep over it. Plenty of less socialist social media sites out there.
It’s just so funny how odd his line of reasoning was. Sure I voted for some of my friends (in the spirit of “social networking”) but I also voted for plenty of others. I also read something about too many of the posts I voted for made it to the front page. I guess instead I should have been voting for crappy posts with little content and less chance of making the front page…..seem counterintuitive to me.
December 12th, 2011
Geoff,
You too? Sorry to hear about that. This one caught me totally off guard as I’m sure it did others who thought they were doing blogengage.com a favor. I know if I owned a site like that, I’d jump through hoops to get users like David.
I try and not get too invested in third party sites because they can sure whack you for any reason or no reason. I got in a little too deep in this one because I trusted–that’s human nature I guess :)
December 13th, 2011
You as well huh?
I don’t know the full story with all the bannings but having read Brian’s response and speaking to him I do understand and sympathize with his underlying intention.
Personally I think that sudden use bans are heavy handed, the reasoning not entirely logical, and I’m not sure the action will benefit BlogEngage (although publicity can always be turned to the good if you’re smart!).
But what to do? Good for us all to remember that no web profiles off your own self hosted site are really your own or guaranteed in any way. Another good friend of me recently had a bunch of Twitter accounts shut down for tenuous reasons too…
December 13th, 2011
You too, wow. I am not entirely clear on what the intentions were, at least in David’s case. In my case, I was told that my account was removed because all I did was vote for the same bloggers and didn’t help the community grow, which is false.
I’m glad you at least have the line of communication open. David didn’t get a response as far as I know-amazing in view of his investment in the site. I didn’t get a response to my last email to Brian.
I guess being in the online marketing profession, I tend to look at results over intentions.
December 13th, 2011
Oh my goodness! I had no idea this was happening. I bet go and check to see if my account is still active.
Best,
Mavis
December 13th, 2011
[...] won’t bore you with the details of last week’s BlogEngage controversy (You can read about it here and here and here and here), because this post is about how Zoomit Canada decides when to delete an [...]
December 16th, 2011
Not sure it was clear in my last comment, my account hasn’t been deleted – I’m still a member of BlogEngage.
Although in my opinion banning you guys and the others was not the right action to take, I do understand Brian’s intention since speaking to him and reading a couple of posts he’s written about this.
What I think is important is to take on board both sides of the story and all learn what we can from what’s happened…
December 16th, 2011
My bad, Jym. I misunderstood you. I’m glad you haven’t been banned and that Brian is speaking to you.
I read the two posts as well and it’s not a matter of their being two sides: banned bloggers vs. Blog Engage. I don’t speak for anyone but myself, but IMO the banned Blog Engagers aren’t arguing that they should have a right to do anything other than abide by the rules. The problem is with the way it was handled by Brian and that seems to be ban first, communicate later.
December 23rd, 2011
Every site has its rules that must be followed. You have to abide to avoid being banned.