A link on the front page of Digg means tens of thousands of visitors to your site, so it’s no surprise that people are setting up systems to game it. The newest attempt is called Spike the Vote. It’s easy to wag your finger at them and say “shame on you,” but Digg is going to have to deal with threats like this if the content on its front page is going to mean anything.
You may remember a site called User/Submitter, profiled at Read/Write Web earlier this month, that lets site publishers pay the service and other users for Diggs. That service wasn’t able to prevent users from getting their accounts disabled and it shut down a few weeks ago. It attempted to reopen last week, but is still not accepting new URL submissions. Humorously, User/Submitter could be seriously undercut by Spike the Vote if both sites end up going to market.
Digg gamers often say that they are only trying to respond to the flaws in Digg – to urge the site to shore up its shortcomings. The more strident those arguments are from people building systems to profit from cheating sites like Digg – the harder they are to take seriously. Digg has its problems but it’s hard to imagine that people like this would prefer those problems be solved instead of persisting so they can profit
Spike the Vote claims to be “a bulletproof way to cheat Digg.” Instead of payment changing hands, users will submit their URLs to the system and everyone participating will receive a list of stories to Digg. 80% of those stories will be randomly selected from Digg, the other 20% will be the stories submitted for gaming by Spike the Vote users. This is intended as a way to ensure anonymity for participants.
Spike the Vote is accepting account requests and says it will launch once there are 1000 registered users. After registering for an account the site says “to help speed up the process, please blog about how to rig Digg. Thank you.” That’s certainly not what I intend to do.
There’s obviously money in social media – so it’s only to be expected that people will set aside concerns of integrity and fairness in order to get some of that money. From the now venture funded PayPerPost to these even more questionable ways to cheat Digg to the Edelman/Walmart blog with insufficient disclosure widely discussed last week – don’t expect to see this stuff come to an end any time soon. We can only hope that the general public will acknowledge the difference between the shady and legitimate sides of the new economy as it spreads through society at large. The lines aren’t always clear, but I like Digg and don’t want to see it over run with paid and scammed stories.
Will Spike the Vote take off, take down Digg or suffer the apparent fate of User/Submitter? It’s hard to say, I guess we’ll have to see once the site gets 1000 registered users.
Why would you write about this?
I can confirm that http://www.friendlyvote.com has been around for long time and it does exactly what this spike the vote thing is trying to do. FriendlyVote was introduced at Digitalpoint forums about 3 months ago when a whole bunch of DP members got banned for digging each others stories.
It’s interesting that they still took the time to seriously design the logo and symbol and they even did a good job with it. The whole communist style design really works well here.
Unlike other spam related services that often look horrible.
Just quickly compare that with User/Submitter and there’s obviously a huge difference.
I think digg design is somewhat to blame here as well…Check out my take at
http://karmaweb...-profit-motive/
Having a high traffic site is very profitable. It does not surprise me that link hackers are successful. Spike the Vote will certainly not be the last to try such tactics to earn some$$$. The spikers will continue and they will only get smarter.
It’s entertaining, how there is a whole dark, sort of sinister side to tech development – you’ve got your guys making fun happy and cheery little solutions and then you have some that make things like this, or click fraud software, or stuff to block VoIP. I suppose it’s just good and evil playing out their roles but it’s always been odd to watch.
I predict this goes nowhere, but what a valant and interesting effort from the people behind this company. Even their little devil mascot looks like he wants revenge. I find this funny.
Several months ago, when my first story got dugg to the front page, I contemplated an idea to profit from Digg. Basically, a company/blogger pays the story submitter “if” the story makes it to the frontpage. So for example, TC lists its blog on my “Spike the vote” site. Now someone comes along and submits the story from my blog to Digg. If this story makes it to the frontpage (legitimately, of course), the person who submitted the story is paid by the company.
I got this idea because Digg’s power users have more influence on the stories that reach the frontpage…so they can legitimately use their powers to submit a story that will likely reach the frontpage and make profit off of it. This is all legal, but don’t take my word for it, I am an engineer.
The reason I didn’t develop this myself (it wouldn’t be difficult) is because I was concerned over some ethical issues.
- Jawad Shuaib
The creator of Spike the Vote commented on this blog entry earlier today, saying he intends to game Netscape, del.icio.us and reddit with his system as well:
http://www.newr...ial-bookmarking
Both this websites are clones of my system that works with digg, netscape, reddit and any other publicly trackable social network. Email me and I will give you an invite code so that you can join. No silly credits, you pay/earn real money. No “fees” just for submitting a link, you set your PPV, minimal price is $0.10 per vote. You have to pledge that you are not affiliated with digg/netscape/reddit, I don’t want hostile admins to erase my customer’s links.
Since this service seems to need to check on your profile to see which users completed their “missions” wouldn’t it be fairly easy for Digg to just ban users that are having their profiles excessively scanned by SpikeTheVote’s robot? And/or since it probably delivers these “missions” via a web interface, Digg could also look at which users are coming from the SpikeTheVote page. It doesn’t seem like their efforts to anonymize the profits will be exactly fool-proof.
It also doesn’t surprise me that a similar service would come out of DigitalPoint.
Josh – Just to clarify, the Friendly Vote system was not created by DigitalPoint but by their members who was frustrated at Digg for banning them because they asked for others to vote on their stories.
Hi, I’m the creator of Spike the Vote.
Jawad Shuaib said, “I got this idea because Digg’s power users have more influence on the stories that reach the frontpage.”
You’re absolutely right about Digg’s top users. Right now at 4:38 EST the top 50 users control 10 out of 15 stories on the front page:
Aidenag – 2
CLIFFosakaJAPAN – 2
curtissthompson – 1
iFelix – 1
Gregd – 1
koregaonpark – 2
aaaz – 1
So in a random snapshot in time, the top 50 Digg users control 67% of the front page.
As an experiment, add the top 50 users as friends and then use a bot (like Iopus Internet Macros) to constantly Digg up their submitted stories. They will start returning the favor for you with their bots. It doesn’t matter what you submit because they don’t even read it….it’s a bot that Diggs up friends, and Digg even conveniently organizes all your friends’ submissions for you.
Now, I personally believe the top Digg accounts are a combination of bot and human. A bot is used to Digg up friends while the human submits stories.
Is it fair that the top 50 users collude for one another? I say that it’s no different than Spike the Vote.
spike, it sounds like you took a baseless accusation and ran with it. Then you developed a site around countering said baseless accusation…only you’re not countering it. What you’re proposing will dillute the quality of digg.
I can tell you with certainty that the top 50 users of digg do not collude for one another.
Josh said, “Since this service seems to need to check on your profile to see which users completed their “missions” wouldn’t it be fairly easy for Digg to just ban users that are having their profiles excessively scanned by SpikeTheVote’s robot?”
Spike the Vote doesn’t need to check a profile, only the “who dugg this” section of each story. Since Spike the Vote submissions are mixed with 4 random stories to be Dugg, moles have an 80% chance of getting it wrong. Plus, these stories submitted through Spike the Vote will no doubt be receiving legitimate votes from the Digg community. If Digg wants to ban everyone who votes on a story, go ahead.
Josh said, “And/or since it probably delivers these “missions” via a web interface, Digg could also look at which users are coming from the SpikeTheVote page. It doesn’t seem like their efforts to anonymize the profits will be exactly fool-proof.”
User will be redirected away from Spike the Vote before being sent to Digg to avoid referer tracking.
Derek said, “I can tell you with certainty that the top 50 users of digg do not collude for one another.”
I can tell you personally that they do. Trust me, just start digging their stories like crazy and they will return the favor.
Please read this link:
http://foreverg...ven_website.php
From the article:
“What really caught my eye with the situation was the sequence of diggs. On the bottom it notes who has dugg an article, and it lists them in order. Confounding as it was, the two beforementioned stories had the same sixteen people digg the story in a row.”
People are just carzy about Digg
Still getting on the homepage does have its benefits – http://webiztod...wordpress/?p=12
Not going to chug into the specifics of this story – but just to say I have looked at about thirty web-biz weblogs and this is by far the best. Keep up the awesome work and analysis
These sites have popped up every other month. They never seem to get enough people to stick around to make it work.
I’m all for it. I could careless what digg thinks about it. Digg doesn’t have a flaw, it just has a bunch of lazy visitors that never submit/digg. If more users started joining in there wouldn’t be a problem.
But as it is, this guy is right. Digg is ran by a few top users. It’s not breaking news. Nothing new. Just look at the front page at any given time.
For someone who doesn’t like these types of sites, Techcrunch sure seems to write about them a lot and give them free press.
It’ll be pretty funny if spikethevote becomes the one site that finally works… and all because of the tech crowd techcrunch sent them.
is it legal?
If I was Kevin Rose, I would encourage Digg’s users to register on sites like Spike the Vote to spy on stories being gamed and report them to Digg’s management which in turn can delete the story and the story’s submitter account! With millions of Digg’s users something like this should not be a problem…
or they can just sue them… but I’m not sure if they will have a strong case??
On come on, there\’s no need for 1000 strong, we have been doing this so long that no one really remembers when and we ar.e only 200 strong.
80% of webreakdigg members are top 10% of digg.com. Spike the vote is so slow to the game.
Looks like Digg mods deleted Tech Crunch’s submission from the public eye:
http://digg.com...r_Aimed_at_Digg
It received 50 quick Diggs, but now it can’t be found anywhere under Tech Industry News. It can’t even be found in a search.
spike,
re: comment 23
Welcome to the Digg’s world! They don’t like you then they will ban you. Now talk about open and transparent user driven news site. Why is this story not good enough to be on the front page of digg?
Don’t like this at all ruins the community
This was bound to happen. It was only a matter of time.
Stan @ post # 21- interesting suggestion you got there
Thanks. The way I see it, the only way to fight (and win) guys like Spike the Vote it to beat them at their own game…
Frankly I don’t blame digg for removing this story. It’s going to be a mess to figure out who’s gaming what stories based on how this thing works.
Michael – Like people aren’t already gaming stories, on a lesser scale?
About 10-20% of the stuff that shows up on Digg, I wonder if people have even bothered to read the article, it’s just such crud.
But yeah, it does an incredible job when it’s not being gamed by insiders.
Nice post, really interesting comments too. I just have one question, given that digg.com seems to be controlled by the top users of digg (SEOMoz had a good article on this, although I can’t find it at the moment) what should be done to limit their influence? Perhaps digg.com needs to find ways to improve their voting system to limit the ability to game it. I know that they made some algorithm changes recently, I imagine that more are needed.
Either way, nice post.
All the best,
Moshe
The problem is in the model…this is noise.
This doesn’t sound fake. I am really waiting to see what happens when spikethevote reaches 1000 regs.
Pff, if my project was ready, I might be tempted to join the service. Sure, ethics, morals, and values may keep you warm and fuzzy at night, but in the cut-throat world of online business and venture-funded startups, you can’t blame small companies for wanting to make an impression.
Take an in-depth look at any multi-million corporation and tell me the vast majority of them haven’t exploited shady business practices at one time or another to get to where they are today.
And how long has Digg been around? This company has failed to address the core issue of front-page exploitation and while they value themselves in the hundreds of millions of dollars they have yet to establish a feasible business model. The reality is they had a really cool idea for a site that is heavily exploitable by nature. User-generated content, for all the informational freedom it allows, will always be tainted by humans, for we are imperfect.
Gosh, that was kind of depressing.
Also, it just dawned on me that this site could easily be a fake, put up by Digg. Chances are most people will register with Spike using the same email address linked to Digg. All Digg has to do is let this story steep (like a breakfast tea) then ban all the users who they can link to Digg.
They’ll get big points in the community for such aggressive tactics against site exploitation and that will be one story I guarantee the admins won’t remove from the Digg.com front page.
Also, it will plant a seed of uncertaintly for people wishing to sign up to all these new Spike-like sites. IMHO, this is an effective means of dealing with their problems.
Crap, I wish I hadn’t reigstered!
“Sure, ethics, morals, and values may keep you warm and fuzzy at night, but in the cut-throat world of online business and venture-funded startups, you can’t blame small companies for wanting to make an impression.”
Ha! What a load of crap. Plenty of companies make an impression without spamming Digg. No one needs Digg to succeed.
to Brooke: You don’t even need to create fake digg gaming sites. Just feed a few stories here and there about those and have a good digg at them. It will send the majority of potential spikers running.
Seriously though I tend to believe the news web sites driven by “Power of Masses” will eventually die off by themselves and will get replaced by “Personalized Content” type.
http://www.read...et_overview.php
>> Darren McLaughlin (#36)
>> Ha! What a load of crap. Plenty of companies make an impression
>> without spamming Digg. No one needs Digg to succeed.
You’re quite right Darren, but my remark was about business generally, not just related to Digg. However, with sites like Digg, Slashdot, etc. you can’t argue that the potential earnings from placement on these sites is something most businesses would openly welcome.
You can try doing it the “fair” way, but many “fair” businesses get chewed up and spit out when competing with “aggressively unfair” businesses. How many great software companies would we have if M$ hadn’t monopolized the industry for so many years with arguably “unfair” business practices. How many great songs would we hear on the radio if record labels hadn’t paid off radio stations, via “Payola?” How many people would have died from cigarette-induced cancer if they hadn’t received conflicting health reports from the 20’s through until the 90’s?
That’s getting a bit off point, but if you had the option to gain business the easy and FREE way, through Digg or Slashdot rather than spending time and money on traditional advertising methods (AdWords, newspapers, radio, etc.) what do you think you would choose?
Yeah, I thought so.
This is what obviously makes digg so susceptible to cheating or fraud or whatever you want to call it
I don’t even thing it’s possible to get a story on to the front page of Digg anymore without a scam (unless it’s from a site with a lot of readers who also use Digg).
The upcoming queue gets so much traffic that good articles slip by all the time without the requisite number of Diggs to get sticky. They get lost in the noise because the submitter isn’t trying to game the system.
I think @engtech got it right – unless you can get an initial number of votes, not enough people even see the story to give it a chance to get to the front page. If you just watch the Digg Spy, you will see stories scrolling by and if they don’t quickly get a few votes, they disappear into the void. At the same time, I’ve seen some stories on the Digg home page that make me wonder how they could’ve got even a few votes, let alone so many [SEOMoz had an article about this recently.]
Perhaps sites like SpikeTheVote may actually be GOOD for Digg, if they force changes for the better? I’ve expanded on this theme in my blog post.
Spike the Vote. Hmmm… Isn’t this just another kind of link farm?
What’s interesting to see here is how people recycle the same techniques over and over (email spam -> affiliate fraud -> click fraud and now search spam -> digg spam) while the people running these systems never seem to anticipate them.
But then again we don’t know that Digg’s management didn’t already anticipate this problem and with a limited amount of engineers, chose to work on other priorities first…
Seemingly this is as a few commenter have pointed out going on quite some time but now its becoming completely obvious and you can watch it live (see below).
We have today pointed to a situation at Digg that a story nobody can access is “spammed” to the front page. If things like that happen this means that actual “users” have long been marginalized and have no influence at Digg anymore.
And the issue is less with those who advertise their services like “Spike the Vote” that IMHO riding out a wave as it looks. Maybe we are already closer to the end of “recommendation” services or like basic democracy they follow special rules if the country gets bigger then let’s say Switzerland. – Or more euphemistically maybe we are already at a point with web sites as big as Digg doing recommendation services they can hardly stay up with their weaponry to fight the spammers.
Besides this 2 questions:
1. How can you recommend a story that you have never seen?
2. What does Digg do about it?
No 1: Well if you follow the model that Digg is passing around as their current “selling point” you can’t
No 2: Digg acted swiftly. It has removed our story showing that (currently) 600 Digg users have dugg a story they have never seen.
The story nobody has seen is still going strong…
The web site as well as cache or mirrors still show nothing when trying to access it.
The info is at: http://www.duve...2006/11/06/126/
The story in question is:
http://digg.com...in_Screen_shots
P.S.: Digg informed us they removed our post because it was buried from different IP addresses – well is that not part of all the gamers approach and not only the one from “Spike the Vote”.
Digg did not explain why our story was the only one on gaming Digg so far ever been buried. It was going very strong and was digged by others immediately. Seemingly we must have hit a very weak spot of them here.
Wouldn’t a good way to find out if everything is rigged down there at DIGG, is to create like 50 user names from the same IP then use them all to vote on a top story, by a top submitter, and see if they actually end up banning the to Digg user, or just the 50 Digg names you created.
It’s up for sale on Ebay now: http://engtech....r-sale-on-ebay/
Karen, I second you on this. I actually like the http://www.friendlyvote.com system because it is free and it is user friendly. Seems like they really have restricted any new users.
So if any of you want to join, you may want to send an email from the front page so they can consider you.
Hey Michael,
Here is an update on SpikeTheVote.com
http://www.famo...ers-get-caught/
I submitted my site to Digg: http://digg.com...ople_find_loans
and I think it’s a great site to post links and news…I don’t like the fact that people Digg based on cheating. I created my site to provide a service…like any webmaster I hope for links to my site so a site like Digg can help me get more promotion. But if people are cheating…that is disappointing.
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