How To: Correctly game a social news site
So, you think you found a way to game a social news site such as Digg or Netscape? You think you are so smart because you are emailing links to your friends and asking them to digg your story? Guess again chump! You are about to run into the cold hard door of failure.
The problem with emailing links to your friends is that when your friend follows the link the site they go to gets a referral link attached which tells them where you came from. It is a simple matter for the site in question to throw in a filter that scans your referral link for certain keywords such as "mail" and to then discount the vote and mark your account as a possible spammer/gamer.
You can tell your friends to cut-and-paste the link but that is even more suspicious because then you lack any referral link. There is no way for you to have organically found the story if you have no referral link.
Sit back and let me explain to you the proper way to "game" a social news site. In todays lesson we will look at Digg
Step 1: Submit a story
So, you found a story and you have now submitted it. For illustrative purposes I have submitted a story but I am not going to provide you with a direct link. If I id that the digg server would know you came from here and discount the digg.
This story is in the programming section of Digg. It already has a few diggs. How do we get more?
Step 2: Sharing a story
We could email the link to our friends but we already know that that is a bad idea and may result in us being marked as a digg gamer or spammer. We still want our friends to digg it so what do we do? We email them the name of the story and the section it is in. We then ask them to follow these simple directions.
Step 3: Instructions on organic story digging
This is a screen shot of the story in the upcomming section of digg as sorted by newest stories. Depending on how active this section on digg is the story may not stay on the first page of upcomming stories (sorted by newness) for long. You can also sort by most popular, most commented, etc... For our purposes we will ignore this page. Instead we will focus on the far more usefull cloud view page.
The cloud view page shows every upcomming story in the given section at one time. There is no need to jump through pages and pages of stories to find the one you want. since most borwsers allow you to search a page for text via Ctrl-F we can tell our friends to search the cloud view page for our story.
Once they find it and click on it they will be on the stories page and able to digg it. As far as Digg is concerned this will look like a legitimate organic digg.
Wrap-up
So, are you ready to try this out?
1) Open up a new tab or new browser window.
2) TYPE www.digg.com into the browser URL bar and hit enter.
3) Click on the Technology section link.
4) Click on the Programming sub-section link.
5) Click on the Upcomming Stories tab.
6) Click on the Cloud View option.
7) Hit Ctrl-F and search for "Fogey" (many browsers can not handle a multiple word search on a web page so pick the one word that sticks out).
8) DO NOT CLICK on the story link yet.
9) Click (and digg) 3 - 7 other stories mixing the one you want promoted somewhere in those clicks. Just make sure the stories are all "somehow" related.
NOTE: If the story does not show up as upcomming one of two things has happened:
- The story has made it to the front page - Go there and look for it before digging.
- The story has been buried - DO NOT DIGG A BURIED STORY!!! Digging a buried story looks very strange because the only way to find a freshly buried story is with a direct link. Digg removes freshly buried stories from their site search soon after they are buried. Digging a recently buried story is a sure way to get your account flagged for gaming/spamming.
That is it.
Proper Social News Gaming Tips
1) Digg often - nothing shouts "gamer/spammer" like someone who only logs onto digg once a day to digg very few stories.
2) Have a Digg pattern - If you always digg programming stories no one will suspect you of passing some gaming diggs in the programming section. It is when you suddenly toss one digg into a new section that you get marked as a gamer.
3) Do not use the digg friends system - This one is sure to downgrade the value of your diggs no matter what Digg says about it.
4) Have fun - Digg is still empty traffic. Diggers do not click ads. If you are gaming Digg for exposure to good stuff go right ahead and do it. If you are trying to make some money than do not bother.
Good tips but far too time consuming.
I may jump those hoops for my own site or one or two others but you wont build a network like that…. IMO…
True enough. If you want to do it without getting caught this is likely the best way to do it. It isn’t all that time consuming. Four clicks and you have found the story. You need only digg a few other stories to help hide the fact that you aonly care about one.
Very good stuff. My question is why are you refering to this as gaming? It seems that most of this stuff is just a way to avoid Digg’s flawed algorithms from killing your stories. If someone posted your story on Digg there shouldn’t be reason why you can’t email it to friends.
Digg considers it gaming because it is not the “wisdom of crowds” in action. i.e. it is not people finding things by accident without outside forces influencing them.
Diggs implimentation of the wisdom of crowds is flawed anyways because everytime the digg count changes we can see what the rest of the crowd is doing.
I could change the title to “How To: Correctly share content on a social news site without being thought a gamer” but that would be too long ;)
Steve, yes, “wisdom of crowds” is some sort of an oxymoron.
Like the post though.
I can see why a lot of people try “gaming” digg. A lot of diggers don’t digg a story until it has hit the front page. Which leaves a lot of good stories to drop into oblivion. When I have a very good story that I know is worthy of the front page, I let friends that use digg know about it. I don’t consider that gaming though, as if they don’t like the story, then don’t digg it. Using friends within is the BEST way to get your content to the front page.
I’ve seen too many cases where digging a friend’s story ends up with the story being buried.
It seems to me that Digg is like a sandlot where a bunch of pencil necks run around yelling: “Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah…” What the hell is wrong with asking people to look at a story? Who controls all this BS? Is there any acounting for burying something? I’m glad Digg is not in charge of air – you would find yourself dancing with a hot girl and all of a sudden be choking to death. Cause of death – unknown asphixia.
A writer or researcher could discover cold fusion and it would get buried for any of 1000 reasons – most of which are speculative. I send messages to people asking them to check this or that out all the time – and from a variety of blogs and news sites. Digg is by far the most juvenile and aggravating system even considering the simplcity of submission and voting.
Phil, I have no problem with people emailing me a link and asking for digg. I’ll look over what they send and digg if I like it. I just will not click on the link in the email because I know what will happen. Digg will see the email referrer tag and discount my digg or otherwise mark me as a gamer of digg.
I have seen certain sites where a link will get 100+ diggs and never make it to the front page. You can get good content onto the digg homepage you just have to take a few extra steps to get it there.
As an experiment a while back I wrote an article about Apple and instead of publishing it here I published it on one of my other blogs that had no links coming back here.
Know what? It hit the digg front page fast! If that same story had been on here it would have been buried.
Take profy.com for example. Anything from that site will be buried on digg. If the owners of profy changed their domain but ran the same content it would make the digg homepage everytime.
When it comes to digg it’s not “who you know” it’s “who does not like you”.
Great blog entry :). I’ll admit that most of Digg is “empty” traffic, it can potentially amount to back links and much more.
I disagree about the use of the friends system on Digg. It’s one of Diggs most powerful features.
Now personally I have to get between 100 – 120+ Diggs before a story hits the Frontpage.
I only have around 140 mutual friends and around 1400 people that have befriended me.
I never beg for Diggs from friends, I just hope they like the story and will Digg. However I do Digg stories that have been submitted by friends.
Now a alot of you might wonder if that might be a way of gaming Digg. For me if I dugg every single story from a mutual friend I would get banned from Digg.
So digg forces you to be selective about the stories you Digg.
I won’t get into deeper detail, but ‘FRIENDS’ do matter on Digg.
Very nice article Steve ! Your so right about this
The key with Digg is to keep an active account, else you and the stories you Digg will be a target for the SPAM bucket. Stumbleupon is probably the next best thing to Digg in terms of base hits as opposed to a Digg home run.
This looks like a lot of work to ask people to do as a favor.
They will have o be good friends.