Wired is going too far against Digg
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.
March 1st, 2007 at 7:29 pm
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..
March 1st, 2007 at 8:51 pm
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/
March 1st, 2007 at 9:01 pm
[…] Ed Felten of Freedom to Tinker has some worthwhile thoughts about manipulating reputation systems here, and Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests — also a veteran Digg watcher — has a post here. Frantic Industries also thinks Wired is playing on the wrong side of the tracks with this one. Technorati Tags: Digg, gaming, Wired | Share This | Sphere It […]
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:09 am
@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.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:43 am
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
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:07 am
[…] Wired is going too far against Digg - I’ve been following the Digg “Bury Brigade” fiasco all week and I like this blog. He does not just cover Digg, check it out! […]
March 2nd, 2007 at 5:20 pm
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.
March 6th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
[…] Wired is going too far against Digg Stan wrote an interesting article over at franticindustries highlighting how Wired has recently run a host of negative stories against Digg, and how this conflicts with common sense and morals, seeing how Conde Nast, the owners of Wired, actually owns the biggest Digg competitor known as Reddit. […]
April 4th, 2007 at 9:35 am
[…] Wired Reporter Buys Votes on Digg March 1st, 2007 Wired reporter Annalee Newitz has written a story (hat tip Techmeme) about buying votes on Digg with User/Submitter. Newitz says that buying votes helped her get a blog with pictures of crowds on Digg’s front page. She created the blog just for this Digg experiment. If this blog had been more extensive and had more crowd photographs it may have been the kind of story that Boing Boing eventually picks up. Newitz posted the story on Digg with the headline, Why Are People Fascinated By Photographs of Crowds?. But no one cared and after 4.5 hours Newitz’s story just sat there with only the one initial digg. So Newitz turned to User/Submitter, one of those pay for Digg votes services that isn’t supposed to work. Four and a half hours later, I was the only person who had dugg my story. That’s when I hired a Digg-gaming service called User/Submitter, or U/S. This enterprise, run by one or more zealously anonymous individuals, advertises that it can help “submitters” get Digg stories noticed by paying “users” to digg them. There’s a $20 sign-up fee and each digg costs $1, which gets split evenly between the service and the digger. U/S refunds money paid for any diggs the submitter doesn’t get in a 48-hour period. I put down $450 for 430 diggs, but wound up getting refunded all but roughly $100 of that. (Wired News is owned by Cond?Net, which also owns Digg competitor reddit.) If the corporate brass at Digg were right, this would be a complete waste of my money. CEO Jay Adelson told me before I conducted this experiment that all the groups trying to manipulate Digg “have failed,” and that Digg “can tell when there are paid users.” Adelson added, “When we identify a (Digg user) who is part of a scam, we don’t remove their account so they don’t realize they’ve been identified. Then we let them continue voting, but their votes may count a lot less. Then the scam doesn’t work.” The U/S service worked well enough that non-payed Digg users started getting interested in the story and digging it. Some clever Digg users didn’t completely understand why there was so much interest in the story. Ten hours after hiring U/S, I had 40 diggs. The vast majority of them had also dugg the Photoshop tutorial or the $35 offer. This was the moment when I reached a tipping point, and I began to get a lot of organic diggs and comments. The crowd on Digg is drawn to what’s popular, and many of them second-guessed themselves when they checked out my blog and saw how crappy it was. Quomen commented, “None of those photographs really appeal to me. Am I defective? or just a loner.” Despite their doubts, Diggers kept digging my blog. There’s a perverse incentive here: Diggers who vote early on stories that become wildly popular become more “reputable” in the Digg system. If you’re trying to move up the Digg ranks, it’s in your best interest to vote on anything that looks like it’s gaining popularity. And my blog, with its flurry of paid votes, fit the pattern. When I woke up in the morning, my story had been awarded the “became popular” tag and had 121 diggs. U/S had done what it promised: The company had helped me buy my way into Digg popularity, and my site traffic had gone way up — overnight, I’d been hammered with so many hits that the diggers had to set up a mirror. The story did become popular on Digg but eventually Digg users wised up and buried the story proving that crowds are both stupid and wise. They were dumb for digging the story in the first place because they thought it might be a cool story but they were eventually wise enough to bury it. Ultimately, however, my story did get buried. If you search for it on Digg, you won’t find it unless you check the box that says “also search for buried stories.” This didn’t happen because the Digg operators have brilliant algorithms, however — it happened because many people in the Digg community recognized that my blog was stupid. Despite the fact that it was rapidly becoming popular, many commenters questioned my story’s legitimacy. Digg’s system works only so long as the crowds on Digg can be trusted. Another interesting tidbit in Annalee Newitz’s article is that she noticed a few other entries on Digg, including an advice article and a discount coupon, were getting dugg by the same people that were digging her blog about fascinating crowd photographs. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch argues that Digg should sue Wired over this story. Wired owns Reddit, a Digg competitor. Frantic Industries also believes Wired is going too far against Digg. It may be a negative story about Digg by a competitor but there doesn’t appear to be anything inaccurate in Annalee Newitz. She also disclosed that Wired’s parent company Conde Nast owns Reddit in her story. What would be unfair would be to tell Wired they can’t report on one of the most popular Web 2.0 companies. Posted in Digg and Other Memediggers Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com […]
April 5th, 2007 at 10:10 am
[…] Link: Wired is Going to far Against Digg […]
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