Is Digg dug?

Apr 20, 2006 Author: Veronica | Filed under: internet, news

I’ve been wary of Digg for a while. While I do enjoy using it to track what’s happening on the Interwebs, the comments have become so overwhelmingly troll-ridden that I can’t even stand participating in discussions. They’re supposed to be a “user-driven” site, but now the Internet-at-large is beginning to wonder just what role the editors of the site really do have. Allow me to point you to an article at ForeverGeek, which lays out some interesting theories about how things make it to the front page, and how other stories are almost instantly banned:

What really caught my eye with the situation was the sequence of diggs. On the bottom it notes who has dugg an article, and it lists them in order. Confounding as it was, the two beforementioned stories had the same sixteen people digg the story in a row. So the 7th digger of one article (Insomn1a) was the 7th digger of the other article. In fact, removing bribera’s digg of one article showed that the first nineteen diggs of each article were identical. What made this really interesting was that the 17th digger was none other than Kevin Rose, aka celebrated creator and founder of Digg. I’ve read that Digg gets anywhere from 500,000 to 800,000 readers a day. 16 (or 19) identical diggs for two articles by the same author? 22 of the first 24 diggers being being the same for both articles? Somehow I don’t think that is a coincidence.

There is a tinge of “conspiracy-theory” here, but I’m prepared to put on my tintoil hat. The evidence does not look good for Digg. The site has a great idea going for it, and I sure hope that it doesn’t have dubious means for pumping up links to the front page, or for killing entires that dare question their practices.

Dig on Digg on the BOL forums.

Digg corrupted? Forever Geek makes the case from Guardian Unlimited

Digging up dirt from Ryan’s blog

Response from Kevin Rose?

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7 Responses for "Is Digg dug?"

Udayan April 20th, 2006 at 10:25 am 1

Hmm, this article is interesting and the evidence is compelling. I’m inclined to agree with you here because of the nature of the identical Diggs. It really would be a tragedy if this was the case – and this argument seems to show that it really could be the case.

I used to use Digg a lot, however I read Slashdot more often because some of the stuff that gets onto Digg is bizarre. Still, I do see a lot of great stuff at Digg.com, but not as much at Boing Boing or Slashdot which don’t get as much coverage.

The most worrying is the procedure of “killing entires that dare question their practices.” That’s very bad news for Digg, hopefully Kevin speaks out soon.
Ryan Block: The Person » Blog Archive » Digging up dirt April 20th, 2006 at 10:39 am 2

[...] slashdot, boingboing, The Guardian, Veronica Thursday, April 20th, 2006 – 1:27PM | | Permalink Posted inWeb [...]
Kato April 20th, 2006 at 10:59 am 3

Hmm… investigative geek reporting. I like it.
Bret April 20th, 2006 at 12:43 pm 4

I could of told you this. I added a story entitled “How to Deflect Digg: and it was getting alot of diggs within minutes. But odly enough it was removed before anyone even reported it.
Jonathan C April 20th, 2006 at 12:53 pm 5

interesting discovery. I always read engadget, slashdot, digg, and your blog often amongst many sites. And i’m a huge digg fan and ive always loved their content from the getgo…but i cant help but to feel rather pissed that they’d pull off material that goes against their practices when they claim that moderation is up to the end-user(uh oh, jon said “pissed” on V’s blog, lol). In any case, if these findings turn out to be credible, then Kevin should come through and make a statement to clear it up if he wants to retain digg’s good reputation…because it can take you years to build up a reputation, but a few oddly-common “diggers” to bring it down in a second
Chris S April 20th, 2006 at 6:43 pm 6

I’m not quite convinced of this. Since the digg users are supposedly the content editors, wouldn’t it make more sense that perhaps this is just digg users taking advantage of digg’s business model? You would think that if digg wanted to inflate a story to the front page (or kill a story for that matter) they could easily do it in a less obvious manner. Just a thought.
Jai April 22nd, 2006 at 3:07 pm 7

I think this story has been blown way out of proportion. I’m sure there are many ways users could “game” digg to promote stories quicker for their own vanity, but by the same token I believe “fanboys” could just as easily bury negative stories that reflect badly on their beloved site. I have no idea either way what happened here and honestly don’t care much, I’m not exactly a power digg user anyway. This would surely put into question the credibility of digg if Kevin, or others behind the scenes of digg, were involved (I hope for their sake that’s not the case). At first glance though it does appear something sketchy was going on. In any case Kevin, or whomever, should have been more clear in their response and either admit, “hey we got caught, here’s what we trying to accomplishing by doing this”, or “look we got taken this is what was happened” and be more forthright in their condemnation of this sort of activity on the site.