I Bought Votes on Digg – Wired.com:
It was Tuesday, 1:22 a.m. on the West Coast, and influential news recommendation site Digg was hopping. A new story about a blog dedicated to showing photographs of crowds had just gotten enough diggs to make the “popular” list on the tech/design page, and several people were commenting on it.
“How the hell did this get to the front page?” Pawperso wondered.
I can tell you exactly how a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary made it to the front page on Digg. I paid people to do it. What’s more, my bought votes lured honest Diggers to vote for it too.
I hired a Digg-gaming service called User/Submitter, or U/S. This enterprise, run by one or more zealously anonymous individuals, advertises that it can help “submitters” get Digg stories noticed by paying “users” to digg them. There’s a $20 sign-up fee and each digg costs $1, which gets split evenly between the service and the digger. U/S refunds money paid for any diggs the submitter doesn’t get in a 48-hour period. I put down $450 for 430 diggs, but wound up getting refunded all but roughly $100 of that.
The results of my experience also undermined Digg CEO Adelson’s claim that U/S didn’t work. Adelson could not be reached for comment after the experiment was complete.
Ultimately, however, my story did get buried.
Digg is so overrated is amazing.
User moderated systems produce groupthink worse than any other thing than I can imagine. Slashdot, Digg and Engadget all suffer from this effect.
What is this fascination with people to try and “break” anything and everything that exists? They remind me of my 5 year old.
Isn’t this inherent of any system where you “vote” the stories into popularity? You know, I could pay a butt load of people and rig an election too, even though the government claims that no one could rig an election that way. Because Digg has become popular on the net, everyone tries to take shots at “killing” the service, similar to Google bombs.
I don’t know if you read the article, but it comes from Wired News, which owns reddit, a competitor of Digg.
I visit Digg once in a while. I have no interest in the site. It seems to be a bunch of juvenile geek wannabees getting excited about meaningless crap. If the site went away forever I wouldn’t even notice.
And this surprises who?
Digg has at least had the benefit of getting some of the worst of the 13 year olds and trolls off of slashdot.
figures
Digg. Interesting idea, great user interface, its founders work very hard on it- the community stinks.