As far as Digg gaming goes - by which I mean artificially pushing a story to the front page of Digg by violating Digg’s terms of use - the actual gaming was never a huge problem. The problem were services like Subvert and Profit, which openly advertise Digg gaming. This particular site offers advertisers 1 vote on Digg at the cost of 1 dollar, while the Diggers who cave in to this scheme get paid $0.50 per vote.

The site says in their FAQ that what they do is not illegal, quote: “No. Violating Digg’s Terms of Use is not illegal. Digg can, however, delete your account if you violate its Terms of Use. We encourage you to violate Digg’s Terms of Use at your own risk..” They, however, refuse to give any identity of the owners, saying that “We are whomever you want us to be. We come from nowhere and we are everywhere.“. Another quote worth noticing is located on their front page: “We are a new kind of black market. We allow advertisers to purchase actions on social networks, and we pay social network users to perform those actions.”

To get back to my first claim, it’s blatantly obvious to anyone who knows anything about Digg that this won’t work. First of all, a universal price for one Digg vote would be a stupid thing to agree on if you were an advertiser. A single vote can have many degrees of importance. It can be completely useless, for example if a story has been buried. Or it could come from a top user with a lot of friends, which makes it quite valuable. I’m sure that an intelligent advertiser would pay for their story getting to the front page, rather than individual votes.

Secondly, yes: you will get banned for doing this, and i don’t mean just the Digg user: I also mean the website that indulges in such practices. Thinking you can do this for a longer period of time is the same as thinking you can get a couple of friends to click on your AdSense ads and earn easy money. You’ll be caught. Hell, all it takes is signing up as a fake advertiser and seeing who votes on your lame story. With a budget of $100, I could singlehandedly catch 20-30 Digg users (supposing there is that many) that are a part of this scheme.

Lastly, I sincerely doubt that anyone even remotely serious would consider doing business with someone who speaks in terms like “black market” and refuses to give any information about their company. Actually, although Subvert and Profit does have one feeble try at being “transparent”, and that’s a single post on their blog, I’m willing to bet that it’s not a serious try at a business; it’s probably just an attempt of revenge on Digg by a disillusioned user.

My predictions?

a) Subvert and Profit will disappear within weeks (or even days).
b) another outburst of stories about Digg being easily gameable by journalists and bloggers will happen.
c) Digg will keep on functioning just like before.