MrBabyMan: Digg Users Revolt, Against the One Pure Man at the Top
Andrew Sorcini lives in Los Angeles, works as an animator for Disney and is the most powerful user that social news site Digg.com has ever seen. Known at Digg and elsewhere as MrBabyMan, Sorcini has submitted a site-leading 2,400+ stories that have hit the site's coveted front page. Those front page submissions have delivered an estimated 50 million pageviews to the sites the submissions came from. A good number of those submissions have been RWW articles, and we appreciate that.
For months, a small but outspoken number of Digg's millions of other users have complained about seeing as many as three or four MrBabyMan submissions on the front page at one time. As we write this he has two front page stories. Those successes are outshined, however, by the most popular story on Digg Friday night: a cartoon accusing MrBabyMan of stealing stories from smaller Digg users.
Just before noon on Friday, Sorcini submitted the image on the left to Digg. An obtuse critique of the US Federal Government's economic stimulus plan, the image was apparently on the minds of more people than just MrBabyMan. Just after noon the image on the right was posted by Kimberly Vogt, a software engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Security, girlfriend of Digg QA Analyst Jeremy McCarthy a Digg employee other than McCarthy and a rare non-employee to have reciprocal friendships with many of the top staff at Digg.
Innocent enough, right? It was submitted in the humor category and Vogt now says the image was submitted "all in good fun."
Either way, it provided an opportunity for angry Digg users to lash out at MrBabyMan. At 7:30 Sorcini posted a message to Twitter reading: "If this is how the majority of the Digg community feels, I'll quit. I won't be a part of a group that doesn't want me" - with a link to the critical, remixed cartoon.
By eight o'clock that evening the Vogt submission hit the front page of Digg - two hours before MrBabyMan's original submission went popular. At midnight a link to Sorcini's Twitter message hit the front page with the title "MrBabyMan Might Quit Digg?" By the time the bars closed Friday night more than 2000 people had voted for Vogt's cartoon and there were 750 comments left between the two negative posts. Vogt's was the most popular of all submissions made to the site on Friday. A heated debate raged in comments between Digg users of every degree of psychological maturity and perspective on the issue that you can imagine: should MrBabyMan go or should he stay?
The Charges Against the BabyMan
There are a number of criticisms that Digg users levy against Andrew Sorcini. The primary one, which Vogt's cartoon remix refers to, is that MrBabyMan submits duplicate stories that other Diggers have submitted, knowing that his superior prowess will eliminate any chance that the original submission will hit the front page.
The next criticism is that MrBabyMan uses an unfairly large network of friends and spam-like "shouts" to garner favors and give his submissions an artificial momentum that they don't warrant on merit alone.
Finally, it's frequently whispered that MrBabyMan and other top Digg users are being paid for submitting stories. There are certainly people willing to pay them.
MrBabyMan and Friends Respond
Criticism reaching this peak really upset Sorcini. He and a group of friends who often engage in hours-long group chats on Skype decided to write up a summary of the situation and see if they could find someone to write about it. A contact brought them me. I spoke with the group of six people for more than 3 hours late Friday night.
MrBabyMan's friends say that top digg users never knowingly repost something someone else already has unless the initial post is poorly submitted and not doing well. MrBabyMan says he never sends shouts to promote his stories and he doesn't get paid for what he does on Digg. The relationship between submission, promotion and money is more complex than simple pay for diggs, though.
I came away from the conversation with a number of conclusions. The dominant one is this. Andrew Sorcini's MrBabyMan persona is sitting at the top of a small network of loyal friends, made up of people like SEO marketers, PR agents turned would-be social media experts and other unsavory folk. That circle is further surrounded by an even larger network of millions of Digg users who try to have fun on the site but also wish they could find success there. Many of them no doubt with they too could find a way to make a living in the snake-oil filled circus that is "new media marketing," as many of the top Digg users have done.
In the middle of all this mess, though, MrBabyMan is one of the most warm hearted, genuine and in many cases naive people that you will meet anywhere. The Emperor is the only one wearing clothes.
Is He Gaming the System?
MrBabyMan says he has added friends to help promote stories because that's how the rules work, if he didn't need to do that he wouldn't. He believes that most of his critics are new users who haven't had enough experience yet to know how the site works. He says he's totally accessible and can be reached by anyone who wants to talk to him - though he didn't know that the email addresses on his profile were visible only to his friends until it was pointed out to him in our conversation.
"All I ever wanted," he said, "was just for the stories to live or die on their own merits. If everyone was on a level playing field I would love that - because I still have the skills to find the great stories...I'm not complaining about the algorithm, but I don't want to be vilified for working within the parameters of it."
Money and Digg
While Sorcini's editorial genius has put him in a place of total dominance over a site that symbolizes success for a world of marketers facing disruption of traditional media - MrBabyMan is one of the few people in the upper echelon of the Digg community whose income is completely unrelated to his activities there.
While mid-tier Diggers are far more likely to be engaging in pure pay-for-play, other people at various points in the hierarchy are building careers as "new media experts." The experience that lands them the consulting contracts they live on? A demonstrated history of success in promoting stories on sites like Digg. These people aren't being paid to Digg stories - they are being paid to do other things (like advising on social media strategy) because of their success on Digg. There may be nothing wrong with that (this author has a private consulting practice in vaguely related matters as well) but to claim that top Digg users invest as much time and energy into the site as they do entirely "for the love of it" and "to share good stories with people" - with no economic incentive, short or long term, is a cynical joke.
MrBabyMan may be one of very few people in the upper echelon for whom that is the case. He says he does no outside consulting and gets no payment for his activities on Digg. He's got a good job working as an illustrator for Disney. You could say the man helps create fairy tales on Digg, as well. The story of the democratically based user generated news site, driven by people in it for the love of the community, may be one fairy tale Sorcini helps propagate.
Surprisingly, the man doesn't have the sense to monetize what he does do online very well at all. He's the host for the excellent social media podcast The Drill Down, where the most successful users on sites like Digg discuss what's in the news and often news about the social media sites themselves. A small audience of rabid, new media savvy listeners get The Drill Down as a podcast or watch it streamed live on UStream video.
Sorcini does go to the trouble to sell ads on the Drill Down, but he asks his advertisers for so little money that it will hardly buy him a nice dinner each month. Adds on the podcast hosted by a man who has helped deliver probably 50 million page views since joining Digg two and a half years ago - are essentially free. Everyone reading here should go buy an ad right now, you'd be a fool not to given the price point.
That's genuinely not what it's about for MrBabyMan, he's not in it for the money. He just likes Digg, and he probably likes all the power he's got at the site - even if he does have to fend off a hostile cartoon from National Security geeks who happen to be a Digg employee's girlfriend sometimes.
He's human, too, so sometimes he fudges a little. "The only promotion I do," he said, "is Digging the stories my friends submit and keeping the chain of Digging going. That's the same thing everyone does and that's the system Digg has set up." Blind digging of friends' stories because they're your friends' stories, if that's what Sorcini is talking about, is frowned upon as contrary to the supposed essence of the site.
Generally speaking, Andrew Sorcini appears to be honestly dedicated to delivering value to the people of the Digg community. By being an entirely un-paid player in the game - he may be almost the only person in his circle whose exclusive motivation is benevolent. There's nothing wrong with making a living as a social media expert, though the term tends to be very loosely defined, but in their revolt against the financially incentivized, conspiratorial gaming of social news - those unhappy Digg users may have picked the least logical target in the guy at the top. There's no shortage of creeps in that scene but by all indications, MrBabyMan isn't one of them.
Is the kind-hearted MrBabyMan just a patsy for a shadowy world of less honest Digg power users? Is part of his job as top dog to be the fall guy when mass user distaste of other peoples' influence peddling and grey-hat tactics needs a scape goat? All of that seems possible. More likely, though, there's no one way to look at this story. The only constant, when I look at these events from different perspectives, is that Andrew Sorcini is a uniquely valuable member of the Digg community - whether they always appreciate him or not.
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Wow, Marshall! You've done it again. This article touches on some sensitive points surrounding social media. There's a number of different issues going on in this drama that highlight the some of the biggest questions surrounding social news.
- There's the purity question. Is this user doing it for love or money?
- There's the jealousy issue. "Hey, no fair! That guy has 3 stories on the home page right now!"
- There's the optimization issue. Is this user gaming the system regardless of whether or not it's for love or money.
These same issues have been debated for some time in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I heard Darren from Webmaster Radio say it best at a WebmasterWorld PubCon a few years back:
"Search engine optimizers make the algorithm better. If we find a loop hole, they patch it up. By the time we're done, there are no more cheap, quick exploits. What remains are quality webmaster guidelines, or best practices that actually help you make better content."
Don't be mad someone is "gaming" the system, it will make for a better algorithm. Because it is a system, there will be rules, don't be jealous when someone is better at them. Kobe Bryant isn't "gaming" the system of basketball, he's just waaaay better than you at working within it's rules. Whining about it makes the whiner look bad.
And, as far as the purity part goes, we don't live in Disney World. Money is a part of life. It will be present in everyone's motivation, no matter if it comes from being directly paid for performance, or leveraging good performance to get paid elsewhere. If you don't want the world to be tainted by the reviling pursuit of money, you might as well go for the source and work to dismantle the economy. Otherwise you just sound like an ignorant high-schooler bitching about how their band "sold-out".
This is a great article. It's a shame that someone who really helped build digg to where it is today is being hung out to dry. I feel like it would really be in digg's best interest to help MrBabyMan and his friends but instead they say nothing. Imagine if all the posts MrBabyMan submitted and got to the frontpage instead were spam. That's the future of digg.
Andrew is a great bloke and as 'Mr. Babyman' deserves all his success. If the naysayers who bitch, fart and moan so much you'd swear they were attending an ex wives convention . . . spent as much time submitting quality content and building a following on digg instead, they too would get front page stories.
It's typical of the tall poppy syndrome . . . knock a man down when he is at the top. Rock on Andrew and remember, never give a flying fu*k what people say about you as long as they are not telling the truth.
This article is well written and for the people who couldn't hit front page if they were the only submitter for the entire day in all categories - suck it up or move on.
Digg users envy MrBabyMan and most of them probably want to spam the website or get paid to drive stories popular, but can't because of him driving so many stories popular.
I don't know if he's as honest as he says, but his submissions are of good quality and I always enjoy reading it's stories.
MrBabyMan does submit quality content and I hope he'll continue to do this, because there are only a few good people left on Digg and he's one of them.
Mrbabyman is one of the nicest guys i've ever met. When I first came to digg he reached out and offered to help me if I had any questions, because he knew I was new. On occasion he has even sent me links to a news story or event that he thought I might like to post. I have never known him to be anything but kind and giving of himself. I agree 100% that the ads for drill down are way under priced. The drill down provides valuable insight into digg and the active users. It's a great time to ask questions, network and share ideas. I've never known Andy not to help someone that asked for his help. Most of the digg users I know are like myself and we submit stories we care about, or that are funny, crazy etc.. and we want to share them with others. I don't care who submits it, if it's a good story I digg it and I think most of the long term active users feel the same way.
I am admittedly knew to this whole digg thing, but I do know about promotions and marketing and it just sounds like there are a lot of "haters" that are jealous.
Seems like MrBabyMan helps to promote quality content and is very good at it. It also appears that he is working within the parameters of Digg, so what's the problem?
If he has built a network of people around him that aids in his success, how can anyone hold that agaist him? Isn't that the whole point anyway? Aren't we all pretty much trying to build huge social networks of like-minded people for one reason or another?
Great article. Very educational.
At the company I used to work for, there was 2 FULL TIME employees (AKA professional diggers) whose objective was to make the homepage of Digg. Some of their client paid up to 5K$/month (and even more in some cases) in SEO and a good chunk of that money went in Digg pushes. What world do we live in? The sad part about this is that both of the employees had at least a B.S. in Marketing and they are reduced to doing this degrading job.
I've never met Andrew Sorcini in person and my only interactions with him via online media, but everything I've seen and read so far makes me believe that MrBabyMan is a clever and decent guy who happens to be very good at working the Digg system. He should be - he's been using Digg longer than most people have.
He's also been a good supporter of the service through the DrillDown podcast and video streaming, so he's probably done a lot to promote Digg to boot.
I've seen more than a few negative comments about MrBabyMan and they've largely been childish, spiteful, and designed to promote the commenter as much as to denigrate Andrew Sorcini. That's rotten behaviour and doesn't say much about the perpetrators.
As to the charge that MrBabyMan submits the same stories as other Diggers and uses his influence to "beat" the other submitters, you need to keep a few things in mind about Digg:
1. Digg's duplicate submission screen isn't perfect, not by a long shot.
2. By the very nature of wire services and news agencies (e.g. Associated Press), many popular news stories are syndicated to multiple websites. Thus, the same story appears, literally word for word, at multiple websites.
3. It's quite possible to accidentally submit the same story, or virtually the same story, without realizing that's what you've done.
4. Let's face it, many people treat Digg like a contest or a game. Some people aren't happy when someone gets the story first or when someone else's submission gets the attention.
Marshall, I think your closing paragraph hits the target: MrBabyMan is a uniquely valuable member of the Digg community. Whether people like him or not, they should acknowledge what he (and many other people) has done for Digg and see how they measure up in comparison. With maybe a few exceptions (e.g. Kevin, Jay, and staff; MSaleem, Zaibatsu and a few others), any Digger will fall short of Andy's contributions. I hope he choses to stick it out, but we all need to respect Andy and his decisions at this time if he decides to move on. At any rate, Andy's critics need to take a good hard look at themselves, their conduct, and the conduct of their peers before casting the first stone.
If we agree that Diversity is a quality, then it is a reasonable policy to exclude leaders to leave room for new entrants.
I wonder why Digg like system haven't yet come to that conclusion.
Yawn.... this is like an in-depth report on the schoolground fight over by the monkey bars. Who cares?
Could you not find anything more remotely insignificant to write about? At least in such extraordinarily minute detail?
I felt like I was reading a play-by-play of some football game...
"Then at half-past-two, 1200 Digg users revolted and started filling up comments at both posts. But, then, out of the blue, a hail mary! Followed by a smackdown and a threat by MrBabyMan. Folks, this battle is really heating up!"
Except that football matters. And has a season. In contrast, these childish Digg stories about the internal squabbling at Digg that RWW and others post about are juvenile and incessant. Mostly because other big blogs (like RWW) give credence to them and repeat them.
How many people work at Digg? If the whole website fell into the ocean along with all their bickering users, would it change anything? Anything at all? Nope.
Meanwhile, I just keep subscribing to their tech feed as I always have. If it becomes boring or filled with more and more Ubuntu "tips and tricks" stories than I can handle. I'll unsubscribe. Plenty of other blogs and places to go. I could care less about the internal wrangling of a bunch of miserable losers who spend all day finding stories to submit to Digg.
Correction: I am not dating Jeremy McCarthy. He's a happily married man.
Give Digg some credit, I don't think they got to where they are by being stupid. I think they realize what's going on and more savvy then people realize when it comes to sniffing out the frauds, spammers and cheats trying to game the system. If MBM was any of those things he would have been banned a long time ago, being at the top means you're noticed a lot more than the casual user. I seriously doubt MBM could get away with any funny business on Digg with all the people that love to follow his every move. Maybe these casual users don't realize that DIGG is very transparent, one click and you can see who submitted what and from what source and how many times. I'm sure they track digging habits and all kinds of things to monitor the system and make sure there is less chance of it being gamed. In fact, it's the people that submit their own websites, spam, and only digg their own stuff, and sometimes from illegal multiple IDS that you usually see complaining the most. Go check out their submission and digg history and you will see. I see it every day, someone logs in submits one story from their own blog or all of their actual diggs are for their own blog that they have asked a friend to submit (Usually from the same group of people as well). If people would just take the time and look at this - they could easily tell who the quality users are.
For Instance in the past year:
Mrbabyman has submitted 1354 stories, that got 2,044,854 diggs and 211,214 comments. His top sources are:
Last update: 1 minute ago
arstechnica.com, youtube, cracked.com, flickr, nytimes, gizmodo, collegehumor, neatorama, mental floss, engadget, techcrunch, readwriteweb, latimes, consumerist, deputy-dog, etc... all right there for anyone to see that cares.
Yes, some of the stories are funny, crazy photos and such but the majority of the stories are serious news type content that got a lot of attention because he submitted it. I don't watch the News on TV anymore, I read the news online, most often on digg and other top news sites.
I appreciate the time MrBabyman takes to find and submit quality content and I think if the people who are unhappy were to even now ask him for his help/advice he would give it.
Been wondering something for a while. I must be missing something basic.
How is it that Digg cannot identify a story as a duplicate? I know that it shows potentially duplicate stories and asks the user to verify but why is it not definitive?
Is it not possible to check whether the same URL has been submitted before or not?
To me the remarkable part of this story isn't the drama and jealousy that pits one user against another, but the fact that Digg has and can identify it's "most powerful user". I can't think of an analog to this in industry. Who is the most powerful eater of Campbell's soup? Who is the most powerful United Airlines frequent flier? It's kind of weird if you think about it.
Here's a video from SilentJay here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYJE2vfpu2c on what he feels on how some diggers treat a friend.
In the old days of Digg there use to be a sense of honor not to duplicate an existing story even if it was from another site. These days that just doesn't exist as the IQ of the Digg culture goes from geek to illiterate frat boy. The secondary result of this is that a single story takes longer to hit the front page, and thus making the value Digg go down. There was a time when Digg would break stories before Google News, now Twitter does that.
It's unfair to blame the management of Digg 100% as this decline reflects on the community - although the management of the service seems more inspired by trying to sell the company than to improve the site. Although their comeuppance is that Yahoo! Buzz is proving that you can build a more popular site inhouse thus ruining their golden parachute.
MR. Baby man Sir can u please give me ur password if u quit digg . Thanks :)
This was also done to me last year. He even made my original URL source as the first comment - while using a hack url as the same submission the next dae
http://digg.com/environment/PHOTO_Egypt_what_s_on_the_OTHER_SIDE_of_those_Pyramids
http://digg.com/odd_stuff/The_Ancient_and_Modern_Egypt_PIC
This shows that even with good content and a good title - it is WHO submits it - not the quality. He did not even Digg the original submission before copying it to get another homepage.
That Flickr photo had already existed 6 months before we found it - so, clearly it was no coincidence that he 'found' it the next day and hacked the URL.
That was one of the reasons we stopped submitting to Digg.
If you did it to one - you've done it to others :-(
YES..., this was also done to us last year. He even made my original URL source as the first comment - while using a hack url as the same submission the next dae
digg.com/environment/PHOTO_Egypt_what_s_on_the_OTHER_SIDE_of_those_Pyramids
http://digg.com/odd_stuff/The_Ancient_and_Modern_Egypt_PIC
This shows that even with good content and a good title - it is WHO submits it - not the quality. He did not even Digg the original submission before copying it to get another homepage.
That Flickr photo had already existed 6 months before we found it - so, clearly it was no coincidence that he 'found' it the next day and hacked the URL.
That was one of the reasons we stopped submitting to Digg.
If you did it to one - you've done it to others :-(
.
YES Sir..., this was also done to us last year. He even made my original URL source as the first comment - while using a hack url as the same submission early the next day
http://digg.com/environment/PHOTO_Egypt_what_s_on_the_OTHER_SIDE_of_those_Pyramids
.
digg.com/odd_stuff/The_Ancient_and_Modern_Egypt_PIC
This shows that even with good content and a good title - it is WHO submits it - not the quality. He did not even Digg the original submission before copying it to get another homepage.
That Flickr photo had already existed 6 months before we found it - so, clearly it was no coincidence that he 'found' it the next day and hacked the URL.
That was one of the reasons we stopped submitting to Digg.
If you did it to one - you've done it to others :-(
Kill that fat fuck mrbabyman.
Kimberly Vogt seems dodgy. Does she really work at Livermore Labs? Most keep a lower profile, not getting into these kinds of unstable dramas, so as not to attract attention from HSA.
Does anyone actually care about this when there are much more important things going on in the world?
Ugh. NERD FIGHT.
I mean, I haven't registered on Digg, but I thought the users were largely intellectual and had a grasp of reality.
Please. Delete this. It's cringe-worthy.
Now, go and digg something about Barack Obama or Ron Paul.
Kimberly Vogt seems dodgy. Does she really work at Livermore Labs? Most keep a lower profile, not getting into these kinds of unstable dramas, so as not to attract attention from HSA.
I can tell you I'm on Mr.Babyman's friends list on digg, and Mr.Babyman does not send shout-outs on digg, but I do. LOL
UPDATE:
This story was buried within a Half Hour of reaching the homepage!
Even with almost 120 new Diggs in the half hour it was live on the homepage
The top comment on Digg was that the story was balanced - so it seems that politics not quality determines what gets buried or not.
That twitter story about him leaving digg has over 2,000 Diggs in just 15 hour and is still live - so a good story can be buried if there are egos are politics involved....
Therein lies the major flaw with Digg
This story likely would have gotten about 4,000 Diggs by the end of the day at the rate it was going and judging by others progressing at the same speed - so thousands will never see it to voice their opinions
Unanswered:
1) Why does he have such a stupid screen name?
2) If he has a job, how does he find the time to (gag reflex suppression!) "share"?
3) If he's such hot stuff, let him go off to another aggregator and see if he can pull the same magic -- WITHOUT any network of friends -- ya think? Hell, start a BLOG. See if anyone follows or even (irony alert!) diggs him.
Anyone who relies on these allegedly populist aggregators to gauge the public pulse is a sad, sad case.
Sigh, oh the drama!
People without lives getting all flustered and Eegos are damaged. Wake me up for some real stories.
This is intriguing for so many reasons. Especially since the people who profess not to care are so attracted to the issue that they leave comments.... professing not to care. It's so polarizing, either you seem to have people who have observed his conduct closely and think he's overall, a decent cat, or you have people who (from my observation) haven't really observed his conduct and hate him for being successful where they'd like to be, or for some perceived slight that he probably isn't aware of.
Now, I don't know Andrew personally. I've said hi to him on Skype like, one time, but it's not like we're drinking buddies. Yet I feel compelled to defend him because I can purely, clearly see why this issue is so important. For one, if social media and by extension, new media are the future of the web, and both are dependent on being able to gain a skillset of identifying hot, relevant stories, and advancing them, then I want to be able to find and emulate the mr. baby man's off the world. If they are villified, how do we learn from them? How do we become them? How do we align ourselves with them (rather than attempt to buy them off)?
This is getting long, so I'm going to write a blog post about the other reasons why it matters tonight and point the free world to this article so we can all discuss this - because this really Does matter if you're even marginally a part of that world.
But I don't think my ideas about this are going to be as impacting as say, Scoble's - I'd love to see him cut to the meat of this issue, him or other popular personalities who write about social media but aren't necessarily attempting to dominate it. Because the resolution of issues like this, as well as what they reveal about user generated/supported content, are really going to determine whether we're still at Digg in three years or if the traffic (and don't forget, the money!) will shift to a place like Mixx. I like both sites here but right now the only loser I see in this scenario is Digg itself...
Think about it - a fracturing community is so much a tell tale sign of a faltering empire.
Does anyone actually see the big picture here?
It's a slanderous attempt by a bunch of jealous hate-mongers for 'the guy on top.' We're not talking about the big bad wolf that everyone's trying to rid the village of. If it can happen to Andy Sarcini, it can happen to anyone.
I am appalled that Digg would even permit this type of behavior to have carried on as far as it has. And for the initial culprit to be a person indirectly affiliated with Digg and still permit things to go from there without taking action whatsoever is deplorable.
A rose is a rose by any other name, and abuse is abuse no matter how you color it. Allowing this to continue and turn the other cheek because 'it's not happening to me' is to give in to abuse and invite it further because it succeeded without retribution.
And who really cares if a story didn't do well and gets resubmitted once it's died in upcoming. The largest percentage of Digg subscribers do not even read the upcoming section. If a story is worthy to make front page of Digg, who cares if the first person that submitted it didn't break front page. Should another who has the possibilities to bring it to the larger masses be chastised for doing so? I thought Digg was supposed to be a social NEWS site, not simply a social site.
AlbertPacino was probably a more dominant user in his time than MrBabyMan.
Your article's a good read. But then I keep thinking... all this fuss because? Media manipulation has been around us for the last few hundred years and it will continue to be for the next few thousand years. Don't rely on just one source, one community one nation.
How interesting that nearly every commenter focuses on MrBabyMan, "one of the most warm hearted, genuine and in many cases naive people that you will meet anywhere," and not one yet has commented on "his small network of loyal friends, made up of people like SEO marketers, PR agents turned would-be social media experts and other unsavory folk."
Just because you over time become friends with these people means that there s something bad about it. Heavy users of digg will *be* in that kind of bracket, no matter what.
And regarding the same content - I have seen accusations of double content posting over and over again when people cannot stand the fact that somebody else might have been stumbeling upon a link. Or have it sent to you by mail. Or by some other means.
I think that Babyman is the scapegoat for the digg elite.
There are a group of users on Digg who basically control what content reaches the front page. If you submit a great article, they will bury it, and surprise surprise, it ends up being re-submitted by someone from the same group.
I have watched this going on for over 2 years now.
I gave up submitting content over a year ago, mainly because I found my work was being plagiarised on a number of blogs that always seemed to make front page with one of my articles.
It's obvious when you take the time to watch how it all works. Even if there is no hard cash changing hands, the same WEBSITES are still profiting from traffic that they would not get otherwise because of this group.
Exceptionally well written Marshall.
The headline (and the one on digg - 'Mr. Babyman Unfairly Attacked') is not exactly fair and balanced.
Good god, the world of SEO is disgusting.
Very comprehensive article. Not long ago I gained access to some inside information about the amounts passed as fees for getting one's story on the front page. Though in all fairness, MrBabyMan was not the one incriminated, but many other power users. Sure enough, the story was on digg and it got burried after getting 200+ diggs and 60+ comments in the first 6 hours. ( http://digg.com/tech_news/Digg_vs_Diggers_Corruption )
If you get time to read through the comments, you might notice that I might have been one of the reasons that sparked MrBabyMan's decision. Some people there where extremely radical in voicing their opinions about this particular user.
You have hit the nail on the head with saying MrBabyMan is the one wearing clothes. I always vote BabyMan because whenever I submit something he votes it for me in less then an hour. He plays the game fair and square, he does not cheat and he blatantly does not get paid. He is the best because he works the hardest and he gets the best stories the fastest.
MrBabyMan is safe as, and the people who Dugg that photo ripping into him are either uninformed or jealous.
Exactly why I lasted about a week as a Digg fan. What an incredibly pointless feud. Are we REALLY that desperate for attention? I laugh at the reference to MrBabyMan as "successful." He may well be, but Digg is hardly a measure of success worth bragging about. What meaningful lives the "top" Diggers must lead.
I know for a fact the community at Mixx has different feelings about MrBabyMan, and we'll gladly take his increased presence if in fact he parts ways with Digg.
Given the impact cGt2099's being banned from Mixx had on both sites, this could be a big development with long-term implications for Mixx.
CORRECTION: cGt2099 was banned from DIGG, and has taken up residence at Mixx in the time since.
Love him or hate him - it sounds to me that MrBabyMan deservers some respect. This guy knows the system and is able to work it to his advantage. The joys of success!
This story is important. Thanks Marshall for having the guts to address the gaming going on here. I understand that Digg standings influence many other pieces of the social web (and beyond). Some of us, the passionate amateurs, have some hope that there is a way for the social web to contribute to knowledge -- like wikipedia, for example. As in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. We want the social web to be people expressing their honest ratings, not gaming the system to the point that only crooks and dupes (manipulated by the crooks) get to the top of the heap. Notice that several posters here are not happy with Digg.
They are talking about corruption. Marshall used the words: "MrBabyMan persona is sitting at the top of a small network of loyal friends, made up of people like SEO marketers, PR agents turned would-be social media experts and other unsavory folk." and "to make a living in the snake-oil filled circus that is "new media marketing," It does matter. I have an MBA in marketing and really enjoy the social web. I might want to work in some capacity in this field. If it is totally corrupt, which it appears Digg is, then count me out. I don't want to live like that.
Some here, perhaps most, are saying "what's the big deal?" and "who cares?" and "Everything is corrupt, why would Digg be an exception?" We've found all along in online communities that they can go bad. The community and its makers need to actively fight against sleazy practices that drag the whole community down. If Andrew is surrounded by sharks and "other unsavory folk", what does that say about him? He's naive and well-intended in his own mind, like a lot of not so great presidents I can recall.
[re: By being an entirely un-paid player in the game - he may be almost the only person in his circle whose exclusive motivation is benevolent.]
While you did write a decent article, I think you are over estimating who the digg users actually are as people. I am in the top 25 digg users and I work a regular job outside of the digg and the internet. So inessence I do it purely for my own kicks! I do not get paid for it, shit if I could quit my job and digg all day and get paid for it; that would be my dream job! I could only wish! I cannot tell you how many times I have heard from NUMEROUS people in my life that I am just wasting my time on digg, because what do I get out of it? and the answer is really nothing even though I hate to admit it, it is just fun and IT IS A GAME. I think all us 'top' diggers must be extremely competetive people who like to be the best at everything they do.....and plus digg is way addicting, almost like a casino is!!
Actually logged into Digg this morning and found my account had dug a MrBabyMan story that I had never seen before in my life.
I am wondering if there is some kind of XSS messing going on?
Buried the story and changed my password just in case.
digg is encouraging spamming. digg is for seo people.
even google encourage it by giving more PR to digg stories.
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