Comments on: Wired is going too far against Digg http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/ Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:55:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2.1 By: article submitter http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-518992 article submitter Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:10:11 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-518992 SeoLinkPro bad the facts revealed! SeoLinkPro bad the facts revealed!

]]> By: Buy Xenical Online http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-443967 Buy Xenical Online Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:18:27 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-443967 salam replaces consensus microgene prize inductance tranzyme severally salam replaces consensus microgene prize inductance tranzyme severally

]]> By: wallCoera http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-438134 wallCoera Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:58:10 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-438134 launches gowlings corrupt balboa painkiller literacies rays launches gowlings corrupt balboa painkiller literacies rays

]]> By: Gelihach http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-430473 Gelihach Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:42:11 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-430473 oceans courts strident possess request psivida metadatafor academys oceans courts strident possess request psivida metadatafor academys

]]> By: m1cah » Blog Archive » Wired Has Interesting Conflicts http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-19553 m1cah » Blog Archive » Wired Has Interesting Conflicts Thu, 05 Apr 2007 18:10:24 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-19553 [...] Link: Wired is Going to far Against Digg [...] […] Link: Wired is Going to far Against Digg […]

]]> By: Blogging News Blog » Wired Reporter Buys Votes on Digg http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-18945 Blogging News Blog » Wired Reporter Buys Votes on Digg Wed, 04 Apr 2007 17:35:51 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-18945 [...] 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 [...] […] 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 […]

]]> By: Lars-Christian.com » Reccomended Reading - January 6th http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-7651 Lars-Christian.com » Reccomended Reading - January 6th Wed, 07 Mar 2007 02:48:32 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-7651 [...] 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. [...] […] 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. […]

]]> By: Daniel http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6743 Daniel Sat, 03 Mar 2007 01:20:25 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6743 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. 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.

]]> By: Ramblings from the Marginalized » Speed Linking for March 2, 2007 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6649 Ramblings from the Marginalized » Speed Linking for March 2, 2007 Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:07:46 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6649 [...] 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! [...] […] 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! […]

]]> By: nrth http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6566 nrth Fri, 02 Mar 2007 08:43:47 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6566 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 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

]]> By: Stan Schroeder http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6562 Stan Schroeder Fri, 02 Mar 2007 08:09:19 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6562 @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. @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.

]]> By: Wired’s Digg slam is offside » mathewingram.com/work http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6549 Wired’s Digg slam is offside » mathewingram.com/work Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:01:32 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6549 [...] 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 [...] […] 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 […]

]]> By: baron http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6548 baron Fri, 02 Mar 2007 04:51:37 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6548 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/ 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/

]]> By: Joe Duck http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6542 Joe Duck Fri, 02 Mar 2007 03:29:34 +0000 http://franticindustries.com/2007/03/01/wired-is-going-too-far-against-digg/#comment-6542 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.. 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..

]]>