6 Responses to: The most blatant Digg abuse yet

1. Stan Schroeder (newbie)

   April 11th, 2007 at 9:02 am

   1

   I’m an avid reader of your blog for the insightful inside-info of a blog network posts.

   But here, it seems that you just don’t understand how Digg works.

   Actually, I’m not sure what you meant by “abuse” here, but I suppose that you think that someone has gamed Digg and got this story on the front page, but the low number of Diggs proves Diggers don’t care about the story?

   If this is so, I have to disappoint you. This happens fairly often. The thing is, stories go to the front page through the upcoming section, and the huge majority of Digg users do not go there. People who do go there are willing to go deeper than just the headline: they will digg a story if it’s from a strong site (like ZDNet), they will digg more technical stories than most digg users would, etc. All in all, it translates to a somewhat different taste.

   Thus, sometimes it happens that a good story (and this one is good and interesting) will get to the front page, but the majority of Digg users simply won’t care about it because they like pictures of cute animals better. In this case, it’s obvious that the long title, the fact that it’s an interview, and the fact that the interviewee is not a megafamous person, contributed to the low digg count.

   I’m telling you this from my experience not only as a digger, but also as a site owner. On my site I’ve had 15ish stories promoted to the front page so far, and while those more sensationalist in nature (like YouTube adds Digg This button) had over 5000 diggs, usually the best stories end up in the low hundreds.

2. Ahmed (l337)

   April 11th, 2007 at 11:09 am

   2

   Thanks for the comment Stan.

   I actually am an avid user of Digg - http://digg.com/users/AhmedF/profile - 1000+ diggs, ~60 submissions, 36% success rate, and definitely over a hundred comments. I’ve been using the site for a while now, and in fact wrote the first ‘Digg is getting gamed’ story that gained any steam on ForeverGeek.

   We’ve had roughly 75-100 stories on a myriad of websites, and I understand the implications of how ‘baitworthy’ a site is - we’ve had as low as ~350 diggs, and as high as ~3000 diggs. I understand that playing to a common (and low) denominator is the best way to get Diggs.

   But this is simply unnatural behaviour. A frontpage story amasses only 158 diggs? We can estimate it takes roughly 40 diggs to get frontpage - only 120 diggs once it hit frontpage? TechCrunch itself is a hot-Digg item - it just smells of push when a story gets *so few* diggs once it hits the frontpage.

3. Stan Schroeder (newbie)

   April 11th, 2007 at 11:44 am

   3

   @Ahmed: oh, indeed you are an avid user; more avid than me, although I stopped submitting with 10% success rate overall. And that 10% were probably the worst stories I’ve submitted, but that’s another matter.

   On topic, I do get your point. It might be a result of a “push”, as you put it, but this push doesn’t have to be a scam or abuse. Although it doesn’t happen quite so often nowadays since Digg changed its algorithms, sometimes a couple of top Digg users could push stories which would be quite uninteresting to Digg’s general public.

   You’re completely right about this being unnatural, but I don’t think that it automatically means “abuse”. If someone would push a horrible story to the front page by gaming, it would get buried. This one was simply remarkably uninteresting (:.

4. Ahmed (l337)

   April 11th, 2007 at 11:47 am

   4

   Well I know for sure that people are definitely driving up diggs. Some of the diggers that dugg that story only dugg ZDNet blogs. I used to be in the top 250 users when they had that ranked list, and I get a few digg-requests a day. There are ways to game the system, that I can assure you.

   If it smells like a rat, it very likely is a rat. And in this case, this frontpage story reeks of ‘how the hell’?

   On an aside, just added another BloggyNetwork article for your pleasure

5. napy8gen (newbie)

   April 11th, 2007 at 4:54 pm

   5

   still fighting for justice huh boss..? for about a year now since ForeverGeek story.

6. Digg these Digg rules (ghost)

   August 29th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

   6

   […] with all good things…there comes a time where Digg is simply being abused. I’m asked several times a week to Digg a story; mainly from […]