Wired’s Digg dig backfires
p2pnet.net news:- “How the hell did this get to the front page?” Pawperso wondered.
‘Pawperso’ was referring to “a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary made it to the front page on Digg,” posts freelancer Annalee Newitz on Wired News.
And how did it get there?
“I paid people to do it,” declares Newitz. “What’s more, my bought votes lured honest Diggers to vote for it too. All told, I wound up with a ‘popular’ story that earned 124 diggs – more than half of them unpaid. I also had 29 (unpaid) comments, 12 of which were positive.”
Her “bought votes” came via User/Submitter, “Where Digg Submitters Pay for Digg Users to Promote their Stories. And, Where Digg Users Make Easy Money.”
So?
“When I woke up in the morning, my story had been awarded the ‘became popular’ tag and had 121 diggs,” says Newitz, going on:
U/S had done what it promised: The company had helped me buy my way into Digg popularity, and my site traffic had gone way up — overnight, I’d been hammered with so many hits that the diggers had to set up a mirror.
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. If you search for it on Digg, you won’t find it unless you check the box that says “also search for buried stories.” This didn’t happen because the Digg operators have brilliant algorithms, however — it happened because many people in the Digg community recognized that my blog was stupid. Despite the fact that it was rapidly becoming popular, many commenters questioned my story’s legitimacy. Digg’s system works only so long as the crowds on Digg can be trusted.
Whether they can be trusted in the long term remains to be seen, given the incentives built into the system for voting on the most popular stories. Moreover, the lack of user privacy on Digg makes buying votes easy.
” ‘We find it interesting that Digg still allows anybody to view any user’s diggs,’ U/S told me in an e-mail. ‘By way of this *feature,* User/Submitter is able to verify that our users actually digg the stories they’re given. Without this feature, Digg users are given complete digging privacy, and User/Submitter cannot exist’.”
However, “Wired Magazine seems hell bent on convincing the world that Digg is falling apart,” says TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.
“I have a problem with that because Wired Magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, owns Digg competitor Reddit. And because Wired isn’t just reporting Digg news – they are actively engaged in using Wired to undermine Digg.”
He then discusses Wired’s “elaborate shot at Digg” via Newitz, observing she mentions “the conflict of interest” only in a “parenthetical in the middle of the story (’Wired News is owned by CondéNet, which also owns Digg competitor reddit’)”.
Adds Arrington:
But my bigger problem is that Wired isn’t simply reporting news about Digg. They’re making the news. And they’re going negative. In the first example, they make a prediction that Digg will fall, comparing it to Friendster. No news was reported – it was just an out of the blue roundhouse punch at Digg. In the second example the reporter actually creates the story she writes about, and willfully violated the Digg terms of use in the process. And this was done for commercial gain – the Wired story describing this has received a ton of traffic (and is actually the number 1 story on Digg right now).
Digg can’t treat Wired like any other user that’s engaged in fraud. Wired is the press, and the press has tremendous power. Wired is putting Digg in an impossible situation, and they should be called on it. Reporting news is one thing (although they should note the conflict of interest there as well), but actively creating negative news about a competitor and then using the massive reach of Wired to promote that ‘news’ is way over the line.
“Shame on you guys,” says a comment post under Newitz’s story, going on, “you own Reddit. The damage this is doing the Wired brand by virtue of how much of a non-story you’ve created is far worse than the fabricated ’story’ itself.. How many other systems can anyone game? Stick with finding cool tech and reporting on that…if your investments can’t stand on their own without help from the parent brand, then take a closer look at whoever chose that investment.”
But as another post sums it up, “Lighten up, folks. Digg as a phenomenon won’t be hurt by Newitz’ clever little caper. On the contrary, it will just bring attention to weaknesses that Kevin Rose will address to make the platform even better. It’s all good. I’m not disturbed by CondeNet targeting a competitor, either. The interweb ain’t fer wussies.
Also See:
Wired News – I Bought Votes on Digg, March 1, 2007
TechCrunch – Digg Should Sue Wired, March 1, 2007
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