March 1, 2007, 9:33 pm
How Digg Works. Or Not.
By Henry Woodbury
What is Digg?
Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that’s important to you!
Like a search engine, the Digg engine — trading in its own version of hits — invites optimizers. In Wired News, Annalee Newitz writes how she created an intentionally pointless blog, then promoted it on Digg using a paid service:
If the corporate brass at Digg were right, this would be a complete waste of my money. CEO Jay Adelson told me before I conducted this experiment that all the groups trying to manipulate Digg “have failed,” and that Digg “can tell when there are paid users.” Adelson added, “When we identify a (Digg user) who is part of a scam, we don’t remove their account so they don’t realize they’ve been identified. Then we let them continue voting, but their votes may count a lot less. Then the scam doesn’t work.”
What’s most interesting about Newitz’s story isn’t that Digg can be gamed. It’s that her pointless blog made the popular list because authentic Digg users added their honest votes to her paid ones:
Despite their doubts, Diggers kept digging my blog. There’s a perverse incentive here: Diggers who vote early on stories that become wildly popular become more “reputable” in the Digg system. If you’re trying to move up the Digg ranks, it’s in your best interest to vote on anything that looks like it’s gaining popularity. And my blog, with its flurry of paid votes, fit the pattern.
