Are we digg-ing too deep?

According to Seth: the ‘smartest’ (read cheating) bloggers are finding more and more ways to end up in the Digg top, which means that the real jewels and gems of bloggers who blog out of ‘the love for it’ will loose out, won’t be found anymore.

I ‘digg’ Seth, but don’t agree with his ponderings of today: the social online ‘network’ will find out about these cheats pretty soon, honest ‘word-of-mouse’ might loose the battle at first, but will definitely win the ‘war’ on cheaters.
The social online network has evolved too much, is too strong and will ‘concur’ any assault on the basic principles that created them in the first place.

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Added after re-reading Seth's post (must have been half awake when I read it first ;-)) At the bottom of his post, he states the same sentiment, thank goodness ;-)

Comments

[franzFerdinand]

Gaming digg is pretty clear to me: get a story enough to diggs to put it on the front page and voila! it's on the top of the list.

Gaming reddit isn't that easy.

Reddit is the only one of these 'social news' (bleh) sites that has a dynamic front page where the stories actually rise and fall throughout the day. A story needs to be sustained with more votes over a prolonged period of time in order to maintain a prominent location. It would take a much more effort to keep a junk story on the front page, if one could even get it there.

I'm just confused as to why no one else seems to have noticed this...

I'd be curious to know what you or Seth thinks.

[Karin]

The problem is IMHO 'spamming' Digg with unreal diggs.
"Sometimes they do this in ways that most of us would consider ethical (hey, please Digg this post if you think it's worthwhile) while others are hiring clickfarms in India to do it for them. The leverage is just so great, it's irresistible (in some categories, just a few hundred Diggs is enough to work your way up to the top)."

Click-farms: result = high on Digg, but for the right reasons?
That's like constantly voting for you own posts (a feature on various forums I know) in order to make you appear 'knowledgeable'.

Won't stick - cheaters are always found out - in the end

[anon]

I saw Wal-Mart do a coordinated Digg for their Black Friday sale - 700 instant Diggs (complete with supporting splogs pointing to the Digg post!). I couldn't figure out how to call this out. I tried reporting it to WOMMA and several bloggers who had reported on Wal-Mart's fake blogs. No one seemed to care.

Coordinated voting is also a problem on prominent community blogs like Daily Kos. The biggest problem is that there's only limited space for the "Recommended Diary" area. This means that people with the resources to do massive vote coordination have to keep escalating to compete with each other, while people with smaller "gangs" behind them get squeezed out. Kos apparently tries to remedy this by just selecting ones he thinks are good and then hoping no one will notice that the 300 votes came *after* the post was promoted to prime real estate. That's not really fair or democratic, either.

[cognitive]

Surely, this is part of the evolution of media, change is difficult - remember Thomas Kuhn. Oh, and don't call me surely

[Zack]

What we are really talking about is who can control the media, and the never spoken fact that the mainstream media types are in a state of war with the Internet. They are doing everything they can to either take ownership of it, or disrupt whatever they cannot own. You can see the aggressive buying up of major websites everywhere. And we have all seen how any viewpoint that is dislike is shamelessly labelled either spam or vandalism.

[A pissed off spam bot]

"Won't stick - cheaters are always found out - in the end"

??

yeah, just like the 60000 Billion [email] spammers we have now a days.

yep, those cheaterz will always be be run out of town eh....

waken up!!