Alternet reports that a group of influential Digg users have been caught using their powers for evil. The group consists primarily of conservatives and their goal has been to bury any stories they consider “too liberal” to promote their own conservative ideals. The group has been active for more than a year, operating multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives.
“The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.”
-phoenixtx (aka vrayz)
The group calls itself the Digg Patriots (DP) and operated a Yahoo group of almost 100 members until it was recently shut down. Many members of the group had already been banned for life from Digg, but found ways to trick the system. Many maintained multiple accounts and sleeper accounts for when they were banned and methods for circumventing a ban were common knowledge in the group.
By coordinating their efforts and targeting the Upcoming section of Digg, they were able to remove “90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours.” This essentially gave them the ability to censure Digg, preventing any posts they disagreed with from having a chance to make it to the front page. The Digg community ass a whole never had a chance to see or rate any of this content.
This illustrates the primary problem with social bookmarking sites like Digg. They end up being controlled by a handful of power users who dictate what content becomes popular and what is relevant. Combined with a lack of diversity in the user base, this makes these sites only useful to a narrow demographic. While this doesn’t mean Digg is lacking for traffic, it does explain why many people simply don’t get what’s so great about it and many others never use it. The content that remains popular on Digg is simply not diverse enough.
Digg.com is the powerhouse of social media websites. It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site. It reached one million users in 2007 and likely has more than tripled that by this point. Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”
This has been a long-standing issue with Digg, but Digg v4 may be the solution to the problem for two main reasons:
- The Bury button has been done away with entirely. This alone will go a long way to stop most of the gaming that we’re seeing with groups like the Digg Patriots.
- Digg v4 is more social than the current version. Not only can you follow people you find relevant, but you will only see content from those users on your homepage. This personalized view let’s you choose what you want to see and prevents others from controlling your experience, making the site more useful to a wider audience.
Digg founder Kevin Rose said via Twitter that, while they’re focused on launching Digg v4, they are going to look into this recent situation.