Digg Deception

There’s lots of buzz around today over Suspicious Digging, Digg Corruption and Digg Fraud.

Unfortunately when a site has the combination of loads of traffic and user generated content there will always be people around trying to abuse the system. A lot of the debate is around Digg’s responsibility and the tension that they face between editing and allowing their system to be user driven. Interesting discussion.

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Comments

Michael Hampton says:

4/21/2006 at 9:57 am

I think it’s going to be a while before we know the entire truth about this situation.

But for the record, I never really did care for digg.

I could probably build a service to replace it over this weekend, but I’d probably need some help promoting it. :)
Jacob says:

4/21/2006 at 11:00 am

Thanks for posting this Darren :P I posted my response to his non-response here:
http://forevergeek.com/news/responding_to_kevins_nonresponse_post.php
John T P says:

4/21/2006 at 2:15 pm

I had published a similar post -Digg Effect -gain or loss?
Paul -V- says:

4/21/2006 at 11:47 pm

I never liked Digg that much.

Reddit, on the other hand, is now one of my favorite sites.
Blackbeard says:

4/22/2006 at 12:00 am

After various attempts at posting a story to digg, I’ve quickly became disallusioned with the whole system. Anyone who spends the time studying how stories move up the digg cloud to the magical “40 digg” tipping point only to magically disappear can see that digg is run by editors first and contributors second. One more than one occasion I’ve seen stories with over 100 diggs in a couple hours just disappear before making it to the front page while a story that struggles to 40 diggs makes it. The only difference in the stories is that one story pointed out that digg editors are obviously censoring anti-digg stories or sometimes just stories they didn’t like.

The real kicker here is that digg doesn’t flag a story as buried by users or editors at all. In fact, they just disappear from the digg cloud without any explanation. I wouldn’t really care if digg said that a story was buried by users or buried by editors, but the site needs to at the very least say what happened to the story (especially if it has over 40 diggs).

All and all I think digg is a cool idea, but it needs to be more upfront about the fact that editors can and DO bury stories. Right now it’s just giving people the fallse idea that they vote on the news and editors don’t control it.
slaythecats says:

4/22/2006 at 3:23 am

I Digged your post this morning – purely in the interests of seeing whether it got through and survived the day or not.

http://digg.com/technology/Digg_Deception_

Apologies if there’s any fallout.
Bryan says:

4/25/2006 at 11:28 am

http://www.digg.com/technology/Darren_Rowse_(Six_Figure_Blogger)_spaming_the_internet_with_Ad_only_pages

Just curious if this is true and if it’s your website they’re discussing?

Trackbacks

godBlog says:

4/22/2006 at 2:44 am

[...] I first noticed the brouhaha at ProBlogger. Darren has a wonderful list of articles on the controversy so I’ll link you there and recommend you take the time to savor the fallout. Perhaps the post to start with is at Real Tech News as they seem to have pointed out Digg’s problems long ago. Anyway, here’s God’s take on the controversy, for what it’s worth. [...]
Yet Another Linux Blog says:

4/26/2006 at 1:52 am

The Dirt on Suspicious Digging at Digg.com…

It seems that being one of the top 500 visited websites in the world has gone to Digg.com’s head. Users are reporting that some articles that are submitted are being dugg by the same users in the same exact order to up their digg rating to get them…
The Search Marketer’s Guide to Digg - Stuntdubl - SEO Consultant says:

11/30/2006 at 1:19 pm

[...] Digg deception [...]
Cornwall SEO » Blog Archive » How to game Digg without Diggers finding out says:

12/6/2006 at 11:26 am

[...] http://www.duggtrends.com Suspicious Digging, Digg Corruption and Digg Fraud. [...]
. .. . . .. the sux stops here .. .. .. . . .. … .. . .. … . . . .. . . .. . » Digg’s Long History of Descrimination and Corruption says:

4/2/2007 at 11:55 am

[...] So Digg finally blocked my IP address – no more commenting for me under pseudonyms, I’ve been ousted from the system for good. Since this whole thing started I’ve been looking into Digg’s past and, sorry for the pun but: I’ve dug up a lot of sh*t. Probably a lot of you know that you can buy Diggs to drive up your story’s popularity. Some new stats on Wikipedia suggest further corruption. And, of course, Slashdot has already long since written about cases similar to my own. You can check out this page or an in-depth blog discussion revealing some of the loopholes that lead Digg discrimination. Finally, Problogger has some links to various discussions related to Digg issues. [...]