Digg Black Market
I guess this is a sign of the times - a site dedicated to gaming digg, called User/Submitter. But there's no reason such a site couldn't exist for del.icio.us, or stumbleupon, or netscape - or any site that relies on voting. Needless to say, I hope this site gets squashed ASAP - it's at the same pond scum level as the RSS Ripoff Merchants, in my book...
On the 'Submit' page, it states:
"Cost: $20, plus $1 per Digg.
After completing the form below, you will be taken to PayPal. Once your PayPal payment is received, your Digg submission will be given to User/Submitter users to promote on Digg.com.
User/Submitter users are then given the chance to digg your submission and other stories for $0.50. After your submission has reached your desired number of diggs, you will be emailed a report.
We cannot guarantee that your submissions will hit the front page of Digg. We reserve the right to reject or cancel any submission for any reason.
If User/Submitter is unable to fulfill your requested number of verified diggs within 48 hours, you will be refunded the amount of Diggs paid for but not received within 5 working days.
All User/Submitter transactions are private."
And on the 'User' page it has a registration form, plus a note: "Pay-out: $0.50 per Digg."
No word on how many users they have right now, but looks like it set up shop just recently. I seriously doubt it will work anyway.
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great idea. not sure why you'd want this site to get 'squashed'. as in, the way the Kremlin used to squash people and ideas?
at least this democratizes things a little bit. if the big record companies and retailers/Fox/MySpace/etc. are hiring massive madison avenue firms (Grey/etc.) to astroturf digg/stumble/etc., then why shouldn't regular people be able to get in on the act? if the White House can use its leverage to buy front page space in major media outlets, then why shouldn't a group of public citizens operating in their own best interests be able to do it?
not to excuse the White House - they're currently buying billions worth of ad space and marketing and journalists outright anyways. my point with them is that money is not always necessary to get a story kicked up to the top of Digg, but i don't see anything wrong with people using their own money to buy headlines - that's how the corporate media works, after all.
i just think we have to be realistic about these things. just because a specialized service for gaming Digg hasn't been publicly available before doesn't mean it hasn't been going on. i'm sure all the specialized political software vendors in DC have been all over this stuff for months/years already.
plus, Digg is starting to fight this vote-buying the same way Google is starting to fight click fraud. and maybe they should. everyone can now choose their '#1'. maybe eventually everyone will only get a certain amt of digg votes per day - that'd be kinda cool. then Digg and others can track multiple diggs per IP within some specified timeframe and then ban the IP, etc.
good on this company for shedding light on the anti-democratic forces acting behind the scenes on the internets (whether we want to acknowledge those forces exist or not).
Posted by: Peter | October 2, 2006 3:12 AM
Interesting comment Peter, although let me hastily reply that I wasn't suggesting 'squash' as in the Kremlin! :-0 More like, I hope the digg admin people find ways to combat it.
I don't think I buy your argument (pardon the pun) about this democratizing things. Two wrongs don't make a right, as the saying goes.
I do like your comment about vote-buying perhaps being digg's equivalent of Google's click fraud problems. That may be what this comes down to.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 2, 2006 3:59 AM
Why give them the publicity?
Posted by: David Tebbutt | October 2, 2006 4:04 AM
Well I hardly gave them a glowing review... I wrote about it because it's the first brazen attempt at 'vote buying' I've seen, so I think it's an interesting story. I also don't think it has much chance of succeeding - and my writing about it isn't going to change that.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | October 2, 2006 4:09 AM
Fifty cents? Seems about 50000% too high.
Posted by: Paul Montgomery | October 2, 2006 4:23 AM
Wow. We'd never do it, but I'm sure a front-page story would be worth 150$ in terms of the ad revenue it'd generate...
Posted by: Jeremy Wright | October 2, 2006 6:17 AM
I'm quite sure there's a market for this kind of service, especially considering the low cost compared to the huge traffic spike from getting dugg.
I hope they find a way to stop it.
Can such gaming service be sued and stopped?
Posted by: Baher | October 2, 2006 6:27 AM
I think the real lesson here is perhaps this. If all user voting systems are vulnerable to gaming, then what are the alternatives to user-generated ranking?
Posted by: soxiam | October 2, 2006 6:42 AM
My observation, and I am not sure about this, that without the site that Richard covered Digg's 'bias' comes from the fact that old time / super active users have tons of friends (exponentially more to be precise). As a result, as soon as they dig anything there is a virtual certainty that it will make it to the front page.
For better of worth, this is a known issue with growth of networks - hubs form simply based on age - the longer you are in the network the more connections you will have. So there is definitely some bias there. I am not sure that site could have worked without this bias though... So I view the site that Richard has covered as a sort of a counter-attack on this aspect of digg.
Alex
Posted by: Alex Iskold | October 2, 2006 7:17 AM
Peter, I hardly think that opening the floodgates of digg-orchestration is a case of better democracy. The closest analogy I can think of is Chicago and New York party politics in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. I don't think it was particularly democratic when Tammany Hall got to orchestrate elections based on payoffs and ballot stuffing. You're right that this is an arms race, akin to the operation of public relations firms. If Digg figures out a way to counteract this behavior, one positive outcome may be to introduce another familiar metaphor to help people understand how *real* influence peddling works.
Posted by: Michal Migurski | October 2, 2006 10:29 AM
The worst thing surely is that they make $20 + $0.90 per digg !
Posted by: David | October 2, 2006 12:48 PM
Hi guys,
This website’s idea is probably stolen from me, only difference is that mine is:
1. already works for some time
2. much cheaper
3. hidden from public.
4. works with popular digg clones, which are much easier to penetrate.
So if you would like to have an invite, send me PM on ICQ: 70408926. To get in you have to pledge that you are not affiliated with digg.com and you are not Kewin Rose yourself. :)
Posted by: alexf2000 | October 2, 2006 1:01 PM
$100 payoff "contest" buys you 2800+ bookmarks at del.icio.us
http://www.blumpy.org/100/
http://del.icio.us/url/fc4f03febe641347eaec66189d109318
I'd argue that 2800+ permanent del.icio.us bookmarks (with lots of accounts having automated bookmarks blogging) is way better than paying for less than 1 day front page of digg traffic.
Of course, the contest in question was a good publicity stunt, and a first, but it can easily be repeated.
Posted by: Sanjeev Narang | October 2, 2006 2:16 PM
Wow. We'd never do it, but I'm sure a front-page story would be worth 150$ in terms of the ad revenue it'd generate...
I've heard it's about $25 in ad revenue from being Dugg, not including server costs.
The only people who will be interested in paying for a service with that kind of cost are corporations that already have an ad budget (as I mentioned in the post I linked).
Posted by: engtech | October 2, 2006 4:06 PM
Digg stories were never democratized and this clearly proves they will never be too. Whatever their algorithms are, they cannot catch this kind of blackmarkets. And the previous "top digg users" story was also showing that Digg is not democracy; maybe these top users were controlled by some companies; I can see an obvious pattern repeating itself in Digg news.
You'd better stick with what you were using or not really believe that Digg is democracy. I think reddit-like approaches are more successful, it's a better idea to analyze user attitudes and give them the news that they are most interested to in individual basis instead of community basis.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | October 2, 2006 9:47 PM
Hmmm, if Digg or Del.icio.us implemented a HIP check (the think were you have to enter the characters in the image) that might combat some of this "fraud."
They could also throttle accounts so that they could only rate / digg a few stories in a 24-hour period.
Posted by: Rob Dolin | October 3, 2006 12:17 AM
Rob: these are real people, not automated systems; Captcha won't work..
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | October 3, 2006 2:51 AM
The problem with digg and many other sites is that you are talking about popularity as opposed to relevance. This is a huge hurdle to overcome and necessitates a much greater understanding of the user. Otherwise, you get "average" responses. Check out my blog for some of the solutions we are working on in this area.
Mark
Posted by: Mark S | October 4, 2006 2:05 PM