Are your Digg friends digging you up or down?
A while back Digg announced some changes to their algorithm in regards to fixing their perceived gaming problem. There was a lot of shouting and back and forth on the subject but, eventually, things quieted down and people moved on.
In the intervening time I reported on a few cases of reverse gaming where people were using bury tactics to remove content similar to their own from the queue. This was very prevalent in the gaming sections of Digg as everyone was reporting on the same PS3/X-Box/Wii news of the day. I don’t know if Digg took notice of the overt “bury-game” being played and I don’t much care at this point.
What I’m about to tell you about is something else that I have recently discovered about Digg’s anti-gaming algorithm.
It seems that Digg has decided (in their infinite wisdom) that if a user routinely digs content submitted by a friend they mark this as gaming. Yep, your friends can sink your content just as quickly as you submit it! What ends up happening is that Digg identifies what it considers to be gaming and, when you apply your dig to the story, it gets buried!
Now, this is not an instant bury, not at all. The way it seems to work is that if a story is dugg up by a majority of your (mutual) friends it will be buried as a gamed story. The rational appears to be that since only your (mutual) friends are digging it up it must be bogus.
This is wrong on so many levels!
As an aside, there are now certain sites (belonging to friends of mine) that, if I dig a submission targeting that site, the submission will get buried by my digging it! The opposite holds true as well in that there are certain digg members who can kill a link to hmtk dot com just as quickly!
I’m tempted to go in and remove all my friends from dig but I’m just too lazy for that amount of work!
- Gaming the Digg: Friends
- How To: Correctly game a social news site
- The truth about Digg’s bury brigade
- The top 11 things I have learned from Digg
- How to fix Digg’s gaming problem
I noticed this a few weeks ago when I dugg a friends post. The and few days later they deleted my account.
Also reddit will not show my posts if I submit my own site.
Time to delete all accounts and start new?
Huh. That’s pretty lame if true. I think there is a big difference between actively gaming and simply digging your friends stories. Maybe digg needs some warnings instead of just banning?
One can say that you might as well just create a new account and start from fresh.
The problem with that is (and I’ve tested it) - no matter how interesting or important your submission is, there is no way in hell that it will get any votes if you don’t have any friends to start you off. Even if a major world event has just happened and you are the first to submit it, a top user will probably submit it after you and get his story on the front page.
I challenge anyone to sign up a new user on digg, submit a story without having any friends, and get more than 10 votes. (with the exception of submitting sites like TechCrunch, ARS Technica or CNET News)
It can be done as long as you are not submitting big news of the day.
Everything is possible. My first front page story happened when Mr. Kevin Rose decided to Digg my story. I doubt he’s still lurking in the “Upcoming Stories” section though…
Damn! That really sucks. They say “silence is gold” but this is a bit too much.
What exactly are we supposed to do? Set up an informal friend network on a closed IRC or chatroom? It does kinda explain why some of my quirkier submissions started making the homepage.
My new policy is to be “friendly” with those who submit stuff I don’t like so I can bury it by digging it!
I’ve also stopped digging stuff from baron.vc and theplugg.com because my diggs work like buries for those sites!
I hope they do serious thinking with the algorithm. Wat’s the point of adding friends and digging their stories only to get buried?
What if you “unfriended” all your digg friends…!
I’m doing that right now but I have sooooo many it is taking too long.
It may not have an effect as they are probably basing it on something else besides friends.
Before you de-friend all you friends, just a note…
In the past I’ve submitted a certain company to Digg (made the front page). It’s a great site and from there on every time I saw news about it I submitted it to Digg as well. All of those submissions get auto-buried as well, so the gaming algo might be about certain keywords as well. Digg decides that you “work” for a certain company and doesn’t let you submit their stories anymore. In practice it sucks, because I really don’t work for that company and just wanted to be helpful because I like them.
Maybe I’ll try and do only Digg related stories this week and see if they get auto-buried after a while…
I’m going to guess that the company you submitted content from was not Yahoo/Google/CNN/etc… or any other “major” media company?
Maybe Digg has just decided to build in a bias against small players in the media market?
Lately all start ups that I submit get auto-buried. I think they are making sure that no one tries to use digg as a promotion tool. (unless tech crunch writes about it)
I think they are tired of people making money off of Digg while they can’t.
There is no real way to monetize Digg and who wants to pay for CPM advs on digg?
Think about it, all those ads are competeing for clicks against digg itself!
The other day someone submitted a link to an online Mii editor… It got buried.
Someone else submitted a link to arstechnica talking about the (same) online Mii editor… it made the home page…