Digg gamers caught in the act
This is hardly news anymore, but this time I personally managed to spot an obvious attempt at gaming Digg.
A very fresh story in the upcoming list caught my attention because it had amassed a large number of Diggs very fast: 16 diggs in the first 20 minutes. The title of the story: MvixUSA 760-HD Hands on Review and everything else about it was very mediocre, however, the story is on fire in the first couple of minutes? Not likely.
So, simple investigation reveals that the story has been dugg by (besides the submitter, Jaybrewer) 15 other users, all without avatars, most of them very freshly created, and most of them digging only stories by that particular user. Bang: it’s a lame attempt at pushing a story that would never make it to the front page by registering dummy accounts.
As I’ve said, this is not really news: attempts like this happen on Digg every day. But, it’s really interesting to look at submission history from that user.
First of all, his success rate is zero. Although he has 15 dummy accounts, he didn’t manage to push a single story to the front page. This clearly shows that Digg isn’t that easy to game as many think.
Secondly, all the sites he’s submitting from have domains that reek of blackhat SEO and automated creation, with several keywords concatenated (links intentionally omitted): www.singleservecoffee.com, www.networkingaudiovideo.com, www.shavingstuff.com and the like. Sounds like an operation with a single goal: gain traffic by suspicious SEO methods, including gaming Digg. What’s interesting, this operation is not exactly hiding: the sites I’ve mentioned link to www.blogpire.com, which advertises itself as a blogging network.
Well, I hope the fact that their attempts at gaming Digg will once again clear the distinction between blogging and shameless spamming.
*update: the folks from Blogpire have contacted me both by e-mail and below in the comments, and tried to clear their name. They claim that Blogpire is a legitimate blogging network, and I have no reason to believe this is untrue.
This said, I haven’t been convinced that their Digg tactics are legitimate. The story mentioned in the article currently stands at 25 diggs, 9 of which come from users who have never dugg any other stories than those submitted by the user jaywalker. To me, getting people to sign up for Digg (who obviously wouldn’t be active users otherwise) and digg all the stories you submit, is at the very least, a shady tactic, and I don’t like it one bit.
June 4th, 2007 at 11:35 am
I think the Digg algorithm is pretty smart - you’ve got to invest meaningfully in Digg in order for your votes to count for anything.
June 4th, 2007 at 11:43 am
@Marshall: the algorithm is smart, but the people are smart too; they’ll never Digg a story with a title like this. This is a good example simply because it sucks: if the submitter had chosen a better title and perhaps a more interesting story, then with some luck and some residual Diggs it might even work.
June 4th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Good God! This guys needs to get an award for the lamest titles ever!
“Donald Trumps Top Shaving Cremes” - what the heck is this moron thinking?!
June 4th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
[…] Digg gamers caught in the act…again! Digg gamers caught in the act…again! This is hardly news anymore, but this time I personally managed to spot an obvious attempt at gaming Digg.[technology] [industry news] [news] […]
June 5th, 2007 at 4:06 am
First of all I want to clarify some things in your post - Blogpire has been around since 2004, and our sites are not automated spam blogs. Each site has a dedicated set of writers who review products - such as shaving creams, single serve coffee, kitchen gadgets, baby products, and others.
You obviously did not visit our sites before calling them Black Hat SEO sites. Our blogs have been featured in the Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal, and many of our stories and reviews are featured on other top blogs across the larger blogosphere.
Boston Globe
http://www.blogpire.com/archives/010712.php
Wall Street Journal
http://www.blogpire.com/archives/006112.php
Now on the Digg front, we send stories around to our friends that we think are interesting, and if they choose to Digg them - then great. I would also agree with you that we haven’t been that successful using Digg - but that’s not our fault. Our sites generate over a million page views a month without Digg traffic. We use Digg to sharing our content and hope that other people will think it’s a good story - obviously you didn’t.
Also on the URL front - having a SEO friendly domain with keywords in the title isn’t “BLACKHAT SEO,” it’s common sense. The titles we write for are dedicated to those topics and if you had ACTUALLY VISITED AND READ Shaving Stuff or Single Serve Coffee, you would see we’ve written hundreds of reviews on products we have actually tested ourselves.
I could go on - but I won’t. Blogpire is a very real - large - and profitable business with a team of people dedicated to great content and sharing that content with other people. It’s a shame you wrote an article without checking the facts and really looking at what’s going on or what’s really there.
June 5th, 2007 at 4:26 am
@Jay: glad you stopped by.
While I can believe when you say that Blogpire is a legitimate business and a content creation network with real people behind it, your explanation of your usage of Digg doesn’t help to reinforce these notions.
You can’t try to obviously game Digg (creating 15 dummy accounts to Digg your stuff is against Digg’s TOS) and say that it’s just your way of promoting stuff on Digg. Well, maybe this sort of thing works for some, but to the Digg community, you’re a spammer.
Maybe you do not indulge in other black hat SEO practices; maybe your record of doing business online is perfectly clean; but when I see attempts at gaming Digg, it’s easy for me to believe the worst case scenario.
There isn’t really much you can do to make me or the Digg community think better of your operation than to apologize, say that trying to game Digg was a mistake, and promise you won’t do it again.
June 5th, 2007 at 4:51 am
Stan I take offense at you calling OUR FRIENDS who have DUGG our articles as fake accounts. We don’t have any dummy accounts at DIGG and if we did have 15 accounts, how would we even be able to login to that many fake accounts in the time you said and DIGG our own articles every time. Lame.
Again you assume the worst case scenario and I’m not even sure why. I’m also not sure why we should apologize for sending our articles around for friends to check out. If those friends happen to DIGG our stuff on a regular basis is that a crime? Is it spam when our articles and the content are legitimate and also of high quality. We think not.
June 5th, 2007 at 5:10 am
@Jay: most of your friends don’t do much else on Digg than digg your articles. And, openly asking people to Digg your article is (contrary to the popular belief that it’s ok to send e-mails saying hey, digg this) also against Digg TOS (well, I guess such things are always open to interpretation).
“you agree not to use the Services: with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the ‘digg count’, blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg’s services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services.”
Look, let’s put it like this. You can choose to accept Digg’s rules - even those unwritten ones - or you can choose not to. If you choose not to, you will always meet antagonism from diggers.
Finally, let me give you an extreme example. If you get 70 of your friends to digg your story in the first half an hour, and all those are relatively new, avatar-less, barely active accounts who don’t do almost anything else except digg your stories, would you still claim that it’s a legitimate way of using Digg?
June 5th, 2007 at 6:09 am
As one of the aforementioned “dummy” account holders, I can assure you, I am not a robot, and the account is not dummy.
Does the fact that I have no avatar mean that I’m a robot? Fine, I’ll make an avatar. (there, avatar added!)
By the way, your Turing test may need some re-evaluation.
Now, we send links around to each other, some I digg, some I don’t. We have no robot or dummy accounts, we all have our own individual account (I at least have only one), and the articles I (we) choose to digg, are my (our) perogative.
I can vote however I choose. If the makers of Digg didn’t want to consider each vote as equal, than they could easily build in some algiorithm, that makes the diggs of elite diggers (i.e. folks who have dug many various articles) have some greater weight. Or I could spend a day, go digg random junk, and then I WOULD be gaming the system. In simpler terms, if you dont like my (or our) opinions, dont read the articles we digg, or better yet, utilize the tools of Digg and bury the article.
We work hard to produce a wide array of content, about news, products, reviews etc.. on a wide array of topics from Poker Chips to Pet Supplies, and I think it makes perfect sense to want to share this content with the Net, and with the Digg community. If it doesn’t catch on, so be it.. Digg has done its job, and people weren’t interested.
Digg is a site whose purpose is the promotion of links based on the reccomendations of individuals. We are in fact all individuals… and we are in fact all exercising the democratic process facilitated by Digg, to promote articles we think are worthy of someones attention.
Perhaps in the future, before accusing posters of either being robots, or a site as being some kind of black hat SEO hack, you should do a bit more research to verify your claims.
Thanks,
Russell
June 5th, 2007 at 7:02 am
Oh, and I’d love to see an apology on the front page with the post, at a minimum to correct inaccurate facts.
Thanks Again,
Russell
June 5th, 2007 at 7:36 am
@Russell: I choose my language carefully. Nothing in my article is untrue.
If I say that domains such as “www.singleservecoffee.com” or “www.networkaudiovideo.com” reek of automated domain creation, that’s my opinion. It hasn’t really changed: those domain names still sound like they’ve being created by an automated SEO tool.
If I say that it “sounds like an operation with a single goal: gain traffic by suspicious SEO methods” - well, it still sounds like that to me.
And, I was more than willing to let this matter slide. But you’ve pushed me to do more research. Here’s what I’ve found.
The story mentioned in the article currently stands at 25 diggs. 4 out of those have avatars - the first sign (I said sign, not proof) that they’re genuine. Let’s skip those and look at the other 21.
9 out of those have dugg NO OTHER STORIES except for those submitted by jaybrewer. You call these people genuine Digg users? Casual users, who choose what they digg? It doesn’t matter if people behind those accounts are real - those are by the very definition dummy accounts, they don’t use Digg, they probably don’t even visit Digg unless you guys tell them to go Digg a story. You have the nerve to come here and tell me that this is not gaming, although the evidence is so obvious? Don’t count on me to be nice the next time I see you guys try to pull the same scheme.
*edit: I have, however, edited the article just to make sure that you folks from Blogpire at least contacted me and tried to clear your name.
June 7th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
“The problem with Digg is that it is full of Diggers.”
Digg is a great 2.0 phenom and this article sheds some light on it’s inner workings. After a quick perusal of the websites in question here I am going to side with Stan. Digg is powerful because it effectively digs, no pun intended, thru an avalanche of daily information to produce streamlined results: interesting and valuable information. Product reviews are interesting to people looking for them but when they are forced on you they are not unlike any other spam.
The first spam I got, late 90’s, it was for some kind of Ab workout. I traced it to the source with the help of my ISP. When I got a hold of the company that sent the email I informed them that I was not fat. I also asked them where they got off sending me an unsolicited sales pitch. Much like Mr. Brewer they became indignant and sent me a link to some form I filled out years before in which I had requested that people send me random product information. Of course the flood of spam increased from that point till it made my account unusable. Today, I am still waging war against the constant stream of useless information filling my inboxes.
So perhaps I am a bit jaded then when I see a site, that is pushing dog sweaters and drunken Japanese figurines, showing up on Digg. Like Stan I am quick to point the dirty end of the stick at something that reeks of spam. I’m also the type of guy to hate the game not the player. Blogging for Dollars is doing just that, blogging for money. It’s not spammers fault that people exposed to random products buy them and as much as I can’t stand it they did figure out a way to make me look at their website today.
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