I think the conclusion that Digg is behind this is tenuous. The evidence presented is:
1. When told about these accounts the activity on these accounts stopped.
2. The OP claims: "On a technical side: Digg can only ban accounts but cannot stop accounts from digging. So, if this was from some exterior group, digg would have only banned them as they cannot stop them from digging."
1 can easily be explained by recognizing that Digg may have decided to temporarily put a hold of the accounts once informed of the odd voting patterns.
2 is bogus. It's their site and they can do whatever they want. It should be easy to keep accounts live but stop their diggs from counting, for example.
It strikes me (see my other comment in this thread) that the accounts could have been created by people outside Digg manually (they are only roughly 100 accounts and they weren't created quickly) and then used for this purpose.
While it's true that digg can do anything they want on their site, pragmatically speaking their development process may not support creating and deploying the change you're thinking of in a matter of minutes or hours.
An alternate explanation is that the bogus accounts are external, and digg blacklisted the IP's associated with those accounts upon learning of this. Most larger websites will have a fast way to blacklist IPs on their load balancers or the like simply to avoid buggy robots, spammers and trivial DoS attacks.
Agreed. The OP represents himself as one with intimate knowledge of Digg's internal policies. It's their site, and it's naive to think that Digg can "only ban accounts".
1. When told about these accounts the activity on these accounts stopped.
2. The OP claims: "On a technical side: Digg can only ban accounts but cannot stop accounts from digging. So, if this was from some exterior group, digg would have only banned them as they cannot stop them from digging."
1 can easily be explained by recognizing that Digg may have decided to temporarily put a hold of the accounts once informed of the odd voting patterns.
2 is bogus. It's their site and they can do whatever they want. It should be easy to keep accounts live but stop their diggs from counting, for example.
It strikes me (see my other comment in this thread) that the accounts could have been created by people outside Digg manually (they are only roughly 100 accounts and they weren't created quickly) and then used for this purpose.
None of that implicates Digg.