

Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners? - lid
http://ltgenpanda.tumblr.com/post/1403230157/did-digg-game-its-own-system-to-benefit-publisher

======
mikeklaas
It is extraordinarily odd to me that digg would create fake accounts to
promote sites. This is a very inefficient (and public) way to tweak an
algorithm that they have full control over.

The only way this makes sense is if it was done by someone without access to
the algorithm. Either an external voting ring, or someone in the company who
isn't supposed to be doing this.

Even that doesn't make much sense.

~~~
HardyLeung
The explanation could be very simple. Obviously Digg's algorithm is extremely
important to the company, and Digg had put together a long QA and approval
process to ensure its integrity. A change to the algorithm may require 5
people to sign off, lots of analytics, gradual deployment, etc.

In the meantime, they run into some problems with the ranking, and knowing
their own algorithms, they chose to game it (or tweak it) externally rather
than internally because they can't afford to go through the official process.
And the intention is that whatever they did would be eventually incorporated
back into the main algorithm.

Unfortunately, some low-ranking QAs were assigned to execute the hack, and
they are oblivious to the negative perception such maneuver would result.

~~~
panacea
And another reason for doing it in the first place might have been to
artificially inflate digg counts across the board to mask the lack of site
activity after the exodus of so many users.

------
jacquesm
When you own a site and you change it you are not gaming it, you are tweaking
it. You don't actually have to game it, you own the thing. If digg wants to
use their own batch of sockpuppets to influence the front page to their
partners benefits they are free to do so, the responsibility, the upsides
_and_ the downsides are all theirs to take home.

This is like saying google is 'gaming' the search results by having their
people influence the rankings / search result pages by changing things in a
way that benefits google.

What would be more surprising is if digg would not try to modify the homepage
to benefit themselves and their partners (assuming all these parties are in
fact digg partners, for which I see no proof). They're a commercial entity, I
do not have high expectations that digg would do what they could to make a
fair rendering of what their audience thought was best.

Digg has been gamed beyond the point of recovery by voting rings and 'power
diggers', to see the people behind digg join in the fray is absolutely no
surprise to me.

Other sites call it editorial control, on HN stuff gets banned, or flagged. No
algorithm has ever been able to survive in the wild without some form of human
supervision anyway, in that sense digg is no different.

Whatever the motivation for the changes I hope they'll succeed in getting the
runaway train under control and to get rid of the feeling that digg is being
run by a couple of individuals gaming the system but if their main 'tweak' is
to join in the game in a way that makes them look like a voting ring then I
doubt that will be the case, and digg will lose visitors faster than they did
up to now.

An alternative (and simpler) explanation for all this data that the author
uncovered is that this is just a real (external) voting ring on Digg, possibly
one that is for rent, which happens to benefit those parties that are already
using digg for promotional purposes. Maybe digg turned a blind eye to this
happening.

Bottom line is it is their site, and they can run it any way they want to
including the boosting of stories they think ought to be boosted. That's not
going to work as a long term strategy, but their 'publishing partners' may
find it worth enough money that digg comes out ahead. It would appear to be a
'slash-and-burn' strategy though.

The individual profiles I looked at all have large numbers of diggs and no
comments or submissions, so a voting ring for sure, now it needs to be figured
out who runs it, and if it is the digg people they should explain the purpose
of this in this way rather than in a more direct one.

Time will tell.

~~~
j_baker
So an external voting ring was created to submit and vote up articles that
were created by digg's advertisers? Sorry, but I don't buy it.

If digg _was_ behind this, then their actions are unethical. It essentially
amounts to treating advertisements as content. It's saying "hey, the community
likes this" when the truth is "someone paid us a boatload of money for this".
Granted, the sanctity of digg's voting system had been violated long before
this. But that still doesn't make it right.

~~~
M1573RMU74710N
The voting ring is not _only_ voting for Digg advertisers. There are a few
blog-spam sites in there, and a few are CLEARLY spam (like buzzll.com).

It could be a voting ring that is also digging "top stories" to make their
digg patterns appear more natural.

------
jgrahamc
It's possible to get the registration times for these accounts from the Digg
API. I did that and they were registered in large blocks starting 10/16/2010
10:03:05 and ending 10/17/2010 13:37:59.

The blocks (ordered by the registration time) have registrations averaging a
few minutes apart with hours between blocks. IMHO these could easily have been
generated manually.

    
    
      10/16/2010 10:03:05-11:32:20 diggerzXX
      10/16/2010 14:44:14-15:08:13 dXX
      10/16/2010 15:38:22-17:42:04 dd1-26
      10/16/2010 22:52:46-23:10:29 sXX
      10/17/2010 10:05:55-10:16:33 aXX
      10/17/2010 12:33:43-13:37:59 dd27-47
    

These blocks do not overlap, although the ddXX block was done in two tranches.

~~~
M1573RMU74710N
Nice.

This brings up another question:

If Digg did indeed do this, why space out registration, as if to hide it (from
themselves?).....or do it manually?

Could they not automate the process, and automate it in a way so as to do it
all in one go?

This could be "plausible denial", but still it doesn't seem quite right imho.

------
jlogic77
That's what happens when you depend on solely on a user community for
everything. You can't control it and the sooner digg realizes that and deals
with it, the better off they will be.

They've created a monster and are trying to control it by cheating.

You would think that they could have come up with more creative names than ddX
and such... If you are going to create shills, at least come up with some
better names and change up some of the account creating dates and such. No
wonder they are having such problems as a business.

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zemaj
On the surface, this follow up post is pretty damning
[http://ltgenpanda.tumblr.com/post/1404511358/second-
confirma...](http://ltgenpanda.tumblr.com/post/1404511358/second-confirmation-
about-diggs-involvement)

The pattern of diggs from the suspect accounts stopped not long after digg was
notified of the blog post and before it was made public.

~~~
wardrox
But, that could just mean Digg spotted somebody else was gaming their system
and they stopped it.

~~~
timmaah
If that was the case, digg would have banned those accounts.

The accounts were not banned, just the digging of stories stopped.

~~~
M1573RMU74710N
That's interesting, but it's nowhere near conclusive.

Digg just had a major update and are in a state of transition still, we have
no idea what sort of banning, shadow-banning, temp-banning etc procedures are
in place.

(unless you are a Digg employee, in which case please do share)

------
jgrahamc
I think the conclusion that Digg is behind this is tenuous. The evidence
presented is:

1\. When told about these accounts the activity on these accounts stopped.

2\. The OP claims: "On a technical side: Digg can only ban accounts but cannot
stop accounts from digging. So, if this was from some exterior group, digg
would have only banned them as they cannot stop them from digging."

1 can easily be explained by recognizing that Digg may have decided to
temporarily put a hold of the accounts once informed of the odd voting
patterns.

2 is bogus. It's their site and they can do whatever they want. It should be
easy to keep accounts live but stop their diggs from counting, for example.

It strikes me (see my other comment in this thread) that the accounts could
have been created by people outside Digg manually (they are only roughly 100
accounts and they weren't created quickly) and then used for this purpose.

None of that implicates Digg.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
While it's true that digg can do anything they want on their site,
pragmatically speaking their development process may not support creating and
deploying the change you're thinking of in a matter of minutes or hours.

An alternate explanation is that the bogus accounts are external, and digg
blacklisted the IP's associated with those accounts upon learning of this.
Most larger websites will have a fast way to blacklist IPs on their load
balancers or the like simply to avoid buggy robots, spammers and trivial DoS
attacks.

~~~
metageek
Or they froze the accounts by changing the passwords (and maybe the email
addresses, to prevent password recovery).

------
brandnewlow
Author needs a detailed rundown of Diggs publishing partner program and how it
works for this piece to be complete.

Otherwise, this is great scoop. As someone who runs a bootstrapped, ramen
profitable niche social news site, I have to chuckle at the irony. The Reddit
founders have admitted publicly on many occasions that they used sock puppets
to bootstrap a community on their site. Meanwhile is having to fire up Sock
puppets to survive after raising $40 MM. Ouch.

Also funny, the article says Kevin rose posts were only getting 30 diggs these
days. Were we getting a glimpse behind the curtain of the true size of Diggs
active community there? To put it perspective, Windy Citizen does about
70-100k visits/month. Our hottest stories each week will crack 20-25 votes.

~~~
klbarry
I'm interested in your experience with your social news site, and making it
popular/profitable. Would you mind shooting me a link via email?

~~~
brandnewlow
Check the profile. :)

------
slipstream
Follow-up: they were indeed gaming their own system, however, this was
reportedly only for testing/educational purposes

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1836318>

[http://about.digg.com/blog/info-site-changes-and-test-
accoun...](http://about.digg.com/blog/info-site-changes-and-test-accounts)

[http://ltgenpanda.tumblr.com/post/1413193597/in-response-
to-...](http://ltgenpanda.tumblr.com/post/1413193597/in-response-to-the-digg-
blog-post)

------
empire29
Wow - if this is true which I am incline to believe though admittedly haven't
reviewed the raw data myself, I expect Digg will begin hemorrhaging even more
users. This flies in the face everything (I thought) they stood for; allowing
the users decide which news is newsworthy.

------
duck123
so what, digg started using the services of subvertandprofit.com? (a
consistently useful and profitable startup for the past several years)

~~~
thomasz
holy shit, they get one buck for one vote?

------
pilif
Why are people still upset about this? By now it should be clear to everybody
that digg shifted to a more publisher based article listing. Either that's
fine with you or you go somewhere else. Why all the complaining?

From a technical perspective though I wonder why digg would add all these bot
accounts, creating clutter on the site, when they could also easily achieve
the same effect by some background tweaking

~~~
patio11
People are upset because Digg cultivated an audience of rabidly anti
commercial poor teenagers, and rabidly anti commercial poor teenagers do not
like learning that they are advertising inventory for a company with tens of
millions in revenue.

There is a lesson here regarding audience selection.

------
jiganti
This reminds me of the online poker scandal on UltimateBet:

[http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19/high-stakes-pl-
nl/ultim...](http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/19/high-stakes-pl-nl/ultimate-
bet-silent-about-insider-cheating-allegations-millions-suspected-
stolen-99247/)

------
benologist
Can't see how that's really much different to what ltgenpanda and the others
used to do to digg.

~~~
travisjeffery
It's different and important because the Author of the post is implying it's
Digg people gaming their own system rather than people like LtGenPanda and
MrBabyMan doing it from the outside.

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terra_t
So what if they did. The Digg frontpage could use a serious makeover.

------
baby
"I am going to wait until 6:34 CST, that is 1 hr from when digg got a first
chance to read it. If by then, they do not give me a reasonable time to wait,
I will be going ahead and make this link public."

Wow !

------
mingyeow
I just feel kinda sad for all the Kevin Rose fans out there. it is almost like
being a Lindsay Lohan fan

