Digg Aplogizes and is Gamed Again

2 Mar

From the official digg blog, by Kevin Rose:

I also want to point out a couple of important changes to the way Digg blocks URLs that have been reported by our users repeatedly as SPAM or that violate the Digg Terms of Service. We have tweaked some systems so that Digg is now able to be much more granular in the way it blocks offending content, so that Digg doesn’t necessarily need to block entire domains or subdomains. Apologies to any sites we’ve inconvenienced with our previous system.

So this is the official position. Well, fair enought… maybe they have improved their algorithms and now can really find out who is gaming the system!

The truth is, they’ve been gamed no more than three days ago with the help of a service I talked about at the time of my banning.

The service is called usersubmitters and basically gives you the possibility to receive a digg to your story for $1.

It’s reported today by wired, (owned by the same company that owns reddit… the main digg competitor…and techcrunch sees something behind this, and wrote an article saying digg should sue wired) and here’s the experiment they had:

The Reporter creates a stupid blog with a bunch of photos of crowds and some stupid comments.
The Repoter buys 430 diggs from usersubmitters (but will get 300 $ refound later)
The story receives some paid diggs, and starts getting attention
The real digg users start to digg the story, even if the blog was horrible,because they dugg the story without visiting the site!
The story becomes popular, and the site receives tons of visits.
Some decent digg users start to bury the story, that disappears

So it seems that the updates in the digg algorithm that were supposed to stop the manipulation of the system are not good enough… or never existed?

What do you think? Is there a way to protect digg or it’s time to admit it’s too big and too messy to be a real resource?

If you’re intrested you may have a look at :