Comments on: How To: Correctly game a social news site

By: digitalnomad

digitalnomad — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 17:23:53 +0000

This looks like a lot of work to ask people to do as a favor.

They will have o be good friends.

By: digitalnomad

digitalnomad — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 17:22:06 +0000

Steve, yes, “wisdom of crowds” is some sort of an oxymoron.

Like the post though.

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 20:48:50 +0000

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.

By: Nomar

Nomar — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 14:51:01 +0000

Very nice article Steve ! Your so right about this

By: zaibatsu

zaibatsu — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 00:06:30 +0000

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.

By: Paul Bradish

Paul Bradish — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 19:51:11 +0000

Great blog entry :). I’ll admit that most of Digg is “empty” traffic, it can potentially amount to back links and much more.

By: HMTKSteve

HMTKSteve — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:31:44 +0000

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”.

By: Phil Butler

Phil Butler — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:16:25 +0000

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.

By: HMTKSteve

HMTKSteve — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:12:54 +0000

I’ve seen too many cases where digging a friend’s story ends up with the story being buried.

By: ob81

ob81 — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:56:57 +0000

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.