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NICK DOUGLAS — "Your account was banned for the rate of Digging activity you've engaged in," an official message said to a user of the social news site Digg.com (according to this blog). "We've determined that the time in which your Diggs happen, it isn't possible to actually read the stories." Why, asked another blogger, can't Digg just force users to click through to stories before ever hitting the "digg" button? Actually, the answers to that say a lot about common sense and number-pumping.

1. The digger may have already seen the story. Many Digg items have already hit other news aggregators or been passed around in e-mails. No sense reading them again.
2. The headline says it all. I don't need to click through to the whole story to appreciate a headline like "Jerry Falwell dies." Need-to-know headlines like this make Digg as potentially useful as the Drudge Report.
3. Once a digger clicks through, it's a pain to click back just to digg. It also feels like a ploy for doubling traffic. And most diggers just won't bother — especially on the interesting links that deserve the most diggs.
4. Digg won't look so bigg. If no one's going back to digg stories, the stats will fall. And that looks bad for the hyped site.