I agree with Mike at TechCrunch wholeheartedly over the fact that Wired is going way too far in their negativity towards Digg.
Wired is owned by Condé Nast, a company that also owns Digg’s competitor Reddit. And while I think that this doesn’t mean that Wired should never write anything about (or even against) Digg, what they’re doing now can only be described as an open campaign against their competitor. Consider these two stories (both published today): I bought votes on Digg and Hunting down Digg’s bury brigade. Both are negative towards Digg, but the first one is the bigger offender, because the writer of the story actively tried to game Digg by paying a company to raise an article from his bogus blog (which he created for this purpose alone) to Digg’s front page.
Questions arise: why didn’t he she pay the same company to do the same with Reddit? Is it moral (I’ll give you the answer right away: hell no) to scheme against a company which is a competitor for one of your services and then use your news publication to smear their reputation with the data you gathered?
Mike says Digg should sue Wired. I’m not a fan of lawsuits, and I’m no lawyer. I can’t tell you what Digg should do from a legal standpoint.
But as a journalist and editor, what troubles me most about this whole affair is the fact that Condé Nast is obviously prostituting a respectable publication which they own - Wired - to achieve their goals. Think about it, from an editorial standpoint: should Wired be having two stories about Digg on the same day? Should it be writing about “bury brigade”? Do Wired’s readers know/care about the “bury brigade”? If I were an editor at Wired I’d say that these kinds of stories belong to blogs that write exclusively about social media, and not to a huge IT/science publication which aims at a much broader audience. I’d say that two stories about Digg on the same day (they’ve had a couple more last month) is way too much. Maybe the chief editor at Wired did say that, but he got special “instructions” from “above”, as it often happens in such cases.
It’s stories like these that, in a year or two, might make people say: Wired was great for a while, but then everything went downhill.
First, I’m wondering how carefully you read the Wired story because the author is a “she”, and I certainly agree it would have been better if she’d tried to scam Reddit as well (I’m guessing there is no “pay to dig” service for Reddit though.
However this is what we need a LOT MORE of, not less! The internet is full of crappy stuff and scheming and the more exposes the better. You and Mike are quibbling over Wired’s motivation fo this and that is worth talking about but hardly reason to cast out the challenges posed by the story..
I think Mike flew off a tangent on this (like he does every now and then). We must not forget that he still gets like 20% of his traffic from Digg. Plus the journalist in question did ask the Digg CEO before doing it so I don’t know how on earth that could be a lawsuit. I honestly think Mike didn’t even read the Wired articles properly.
You can read the author of the article’s response on her blog:
http://www.techsploitation.com/2007/03/01/ive-got-a-bad-reputation/
@Joe: yes, it’s a she, lapsus calami. It’s corrected (and yes, I’ve read the article).
Also, while I do agree that the story brings something new to the table (although to experienced diggers this is not news), my primary claim in this article is that Wired is pushing this topic too far. I’ve read too many stories on how Digg is going down from Wired, and while there’s nothing wrong with writing about Digg, it’s not what I expect from this particular magazine.
@baron: I agree, a lawsuit is too much, but it’s just Mike’s bombastic approach to keep the attention high.
Actually, Wired likes to talk about Digg these days as a related third news shows:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/herding.html
There is a high chance that the integrity of Digg is going to have to suffer, along with the whole idea of a “social web.” The moment we get paid to digg stories is when Digg(or reddit if you will) could start to go downwards.