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April 20, 2006

Digg Gets the Three Minute Hate

I won't deny it's been hard to resist the temptation to IM all my friends with Digg accounts and have them Digg posts from my blog. Twenty Diggs or so right out of the starting blocks would give a post a nice start towards that front page.

However, ForeverGeek makes a case that perhaps Digg has fallen prey to this temptation itself, noting a few frontpaged stories that were Dugg by almost the same exact group of people, in almost the same exact order:

Lo and behold, the first sixteen diggs for each story were identical! If we remove bribera from one of them, the first nineteen diggs were identical for both stories. In fact, of the first 24 diggs, only 2 users varied for both stories. Hey, even Digg-founder Kevin Rose is seen there.

Then it gets more interesting when a few ForeverGeek readers try to submit that story and are summarily banned from Digg, along with ForeverGeek itself. That inspired a second, more detailed ForeverGeek post.

So I gathered all the evidence and put it into a post: Digg's founder was involved in this automated promotion system (all the diggs in a row, a comment about how it was on the front page and no comments, etc), ForeverGeek was banned for noting it, and Digg was no longer truly a social network system (as obvious editorial control had come into play).

Then it goes apeshit viral, and is everywhere within hours, including Slashdot, Boing Boing as well as news sites like tech memorandum and reddit. The submitted stories drift in and out of Digg. Digg responds, saying ForeverGeek was banned for spamming Digg (by using the same technique ForeverGeek claims Digg was using to spam itself):

The banning of forevergeek.com: Aside from the dozens of user reports, several accounts were created to artificially inflate the digg count of their stories. When a single URL hits a threshold of reports, our standard procedure is to block that URL from submission (spam control). Again, mass fraud digging is in violation of our terms of service.

Jason Calacanis decries the hate:

It's funny... the reward for being successful in the blogosphere is now pure hate (check Scoble, Gawker, Engadget, MySpace, etc). The Internet industry used to be competitive, but because the freak contingent didn't have blogs you could basically ignore them.

I'll reserve judgment. I still like Digg, and I've wasted the past half hour reading all these posts on what will probably be a non-story tomorrow (we'll see). Likely the most interesting thing to come of this will be the way Digg handles its first big PR nightmare. As others have pointed out, Digg has the right to exert editorial control (maybe even abuse it a bit), especially if it produces a better product, so perhaps it doesn't much matter in the end how the stories get there.

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