Getting on to the home page of Digg (profile) sends a site a lot of traffic, and some folks will do just about anything for traffic. I know a lot of people who claim to have multiple Digg accounts to give their posts a lift, but it appears that the practice has become more…professional recently. Richard MacManus has done some research on the issue and posts on his findings. Bottom line - at least for now, gaming Digg is exceptionally easy.
by
Michael Arrington
on
December 27, 2005
Responses
- Ondas, cables, luces, cacharritos y cachivaches » Como engañar a Digg (y a Meneame?)
December 28th, 2005 at 9:41 am - TechCrunch » The Power of Digg
March 18th, 2006 at 8:21 pm - TechCrunch en français » La puissance de Digg
March 18th, 2006 at 10:08 pm - CapeCodSEO
February 3rd, 2007 at 10:51 am - PlagiarismToday » Social News: Another Plagiarism Concern
April 19th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Strangely, it doesn’t seem to do even some basic ip checking.
I love Digg, but unless they stay ahead of the curve, the exploits are all over the place and we could see some nasty results. The democratic ranking of stories is nice, but it can easily be abused, and we already see this with the “report” feature as it can sometimes put legitimate stories in purgatory by 13 year olds with nothing better to do.
Adaptation is Digg’s best friend throughout its existence.
Wow… 10 hours after that last post, every front page story on Digg has been uhhh…. Comment Bombed?
I agree. Diggers are click happy. If you put a link up on Digg, even in a signature, you are guaranteed to get a few hits. People like Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger pimps his own stories using a secondary account. He posts as Ozii, and then enters a comment as darrenrowse. It’s only natural to try to use all angles to get traffic to your site. I post my own stories up on occasion even though many Diggers will post a comment flaming the fact that someone posted a link to a blog…especially their own blog. Digg is a treasure trove of traffic if you only get the right story.
I think this kind of thing — everything from gaming Digg or memeorandum to SEO tactics with Google and others — is going to become increasingly important in the “reputation economy.” Hopefully some of it, maybe even the site-scrapers you and Om have been the victims of, will be self-regulating as people get wise to such behaviour.
I stopped posting on DIGG because of all of this. Sure I wanted easy traffic, but I guess I am just to straight laced…