Digg’s Diggers Dugg Digging Digg’s Grave (or Paying Your Way to the Front)
Of course, credibility is an important thing in any business, and especially one where you’re trusted to provide good information. Digg has been having credibility issues for a while now with rumors of Diggers getting paid to Digg articles, and it just got smashed in the face with a battering ram.
Here was the experiment: Annalee Newitz decided she would try an experiment and write an article about it. She would create one of the worst blogs ever - it’s at http://www.crowdhacking.com/blog/, not even going to give it nofollowed-link-love.
And then she would hire a Digg promotion company to promote it. For $100, she hit the front page (and incidentally, came up with some of the best link-bait I’ve seen in a while). Here’s a quote from Adelson saying Digg can’t be gamed, but obviously this experiment proves that wrong:
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.”
So what can we learn? Digg can be gamed. Gaming Digg can get you a lot of link love. More generally, uncovering hard fact that proves rumors gets you lots of link love.
