

Detailed How-To From Banned Digger - mathewgj
http://aszx.net/how-i-became-a-digg-power-user-with-a-75-popular-ratio.html

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Prrometheus
>"I hope this article can help those normal diggers understand just how it is
the power users got that way, and why digg is not a democracy"

Actually, it sounds like Digg is exactly a democracy to me. You have as much
chance making the front page of Digg (or a popular subreddit) as you do
getting your preferred policies enacted by the government - essentially zero.
Having your voice heard in a crowd of millions is hard. Those that succeed
usually hack the system.

The position that there is no conflict between competing interests in a
democracy because "everybody has a voice" is BS (not that I would expect such
arguments from this crowd). You can ask my sister who was outvoted for 18
years by my brother and I, the Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq, the Tamils in Sri
Lanka, or the Republicans in DC about how great a job democracy does of
balancing competing interests.

~~~
rw
What we have in the U.S. is not democracy (literally, "rule by the people").
We have, instead, a quasi-accountable tyranny of politicos and lobbyists. Do
not call that _democracy_.

~~~
Prrometheus
I am curious exactly what you think democracy is, then. The combination of
democracy with large bureaucracies is vulnerable to horse trading and power
abuse, behind-the-scenes deals and favors, pork politics, and the like.
Bureaucracy is needed to implement the policies desired by democracy, so there
is really no way around it.

I think of some examples of well-run, transparent democracies in history, but
they are all much geographically smaller, less populated, or poorer than the
United States.

~~~
Ardit20
I think democracy is implementing the will of the people. No scrap that.

Democracy is doing what a reasonable man would do. There is no arguing that
the people might have not been told the true reasons for going to Iraq.
Nonetheless most of the people are reasonable hence there is no reason to lie
to them.

Democracy is about being guided by high principles, by acknowledging that each
human on this earth deserves equal treatment, by acknoledgin that my interests
do not come before another etc.

Socrates said that the rulers ought to be philosophers taught in academia for
25 years. Or maybe it was Aristotle.

The point is that we know that the majority might be wrong, we certainly know
that the minority might be wrong, but in the system of governence we currently
hold it is rather apparante that the prevailing principle is that if you have
more I will have less.

There must have been a time when people realised thatthey could have been born
into any family, any country, any social status, etcetera. I believe that is
the time when empathy emerged for fellow human beings.

If we as people realise what it means to be in someones shoes and continue to
treat that someone inhumanly, or take away from him privileges that we
ourselves enjoy, we become barbaric and not much different from our ancestors
who found slavery convinient or colonialism profitable.

The people posses empathy. It is this question of what if that person was I
that I believe has hlped us advanced somewhat.

If people are not governed by leaders whom are guided by reason rather than
personal or country interests there will never be peace on earth nor happiness
in the houses.

------
alexandros
Extremely intresting article on how digg users have managed to bend the
algorithm to their whims. I wonder if any social news site is really immune to
this.

~~~
tome
Any algorithm is going to end up being exploitable. It's an arms race, but
like with evolution, it's the only way.

------
nazgulnarsil
classic example of how democracy turns into an in-group oligarchy. there is no
way to engineer a democracy so that certain people will not wield
disproportionate power.

this is a problem, for government to be effective responsibility and power
must be equal. since democracy always ultimately ties responsibility back to
the masses there is no accountability.

notice how in this example, just as with political democracy, power is wielded
through framing what people vote on and not controlling the votes directly.
the in-group does not actively prevent any story from reaching the top. but
engineer the system in such a way that it is phenomenally unlikely for out-
groups to get their content noticed, regardless of merit.

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snorkel
All that effort just to front page a story on a news site overrun by idiots.
What sad, sad, waste of time.

~~~
tectonic
Well, maybe. But my site <http://absurdlycool.com> didn't go anywhere for a
year until I got it on the Digg frontpage (got all my friends to Digg it back
when that worked) and then it took off and has stayed at 5k unique per day
ever since. The value of that Digg frontpage to me has been many thousands of
dollars in revenue at this point, and that PR resulted in a subsequent write
up on TechCrunch, LifeHacker, etc.

~~~
tectonic
Speaking of which, feel free to Digg my variant on the above site. However,
these days it's _really_ hard to get on the Digg frontpage.

<http://tinyurl.com/7t2ydc>

:)

~~~
ruslan
Yes and no. There's a lot of moderation (by human beings) is now going on,
nonetheless we got our stuff on digg frontpage thrice without any
"extraterrestrial" help, just submitted links. Last time it happened in
Nov/2008.

Yet, it did not help much to grow visitors, in all the cases it just resulted
in a spike and fall flat after that. Digg is totally useless as a promo
service, same is true about Reddit, Stumbleupon & Co.

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0xdefec8
Sounds a lot like politics. Just with more hotpockets and wizard capes.

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ojbyrne
The banning thing is dumb.

<http://digg.com/how>: "Digg is democratizing digital media." Riiiight...

~~~
kirubakaran
Even the best democratic governments of the world imprison individuals who
they consider to be a "public disturbance" etc. And the definition of "public
disturbance" usually has a pretty wide scope.

~~~
ojbyrne
Even the worst democratic governments of the world have due process, the right
to actually hear what the charges are, courts, etc.

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jackowayed
if only there were a place where posting a story instantly puts it on the
front page at least briefly, and where people actually vote for submissions
because they're good, not just so that the submitter will reciprocate. It
would be an added bonus if the comments weren't filled with mindless drivel.
But that's clearly a utopia that could _never_ exist.

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antiform
This is a very insightful article, and I'm impressed with how much work the
author put into getting something onto the front page of digg. If I were
looking for somebody to do effective online PR, I'd be looking for somebody
like this.

I think it's somewhat sad that digg is so huge now that it takes so much
effort to get people to pay attention to an interesting link, and I'd be
interesting in seeing if there were any way to counteract the user
fragmentation that occurs as a social news site gets popular. Reddit-like
categories seem to be one solution, but it seems more like a band-aid than a
total solution.

~~~
mleonhard
I think it would be better to create a site that embraces the user
fragmentation. I want to create a news aggregation site that provides a
different set of articles for each user.

~~~
lincolnq
I made one. :) <http://newsbrane.com>

Please send me feedback!

~~~
mleonhard
You won't get many users if you make them sign up.

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d0mine
_26,000 diggs in two months should have meant, $13k right_ </quote>

It is about one digg per minute working full-time (8 hours a day) for two
months straight!

    
    
      26 000 / ((2 months) / ((24 hours) / (8 hours))) = 0.889820511 minutes^(-1)
    

google calculator: <http://is.gd/dnFp>

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ntoshev
Are any of you guys practicing mutual upvoting with friends here, on Hacker
News?

I suppose it happens naturally to some extent. These voting patterns and the
amount to which they happen naturally should be statistically visible for pg
if he is actively looking for them.

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wesley
If someone really wanted to, alot of this could be automated. Ofcourse, there
probably already are such bots (unfortunately)

------
known
Democracy != Meritocracy

------
gojomo
Alternate title: "How to win at World of Diggcraft"

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Ardit20
I guess there is a lot to learn from this article which goes way beyond digg
to the internet in general and maybe AI and also probably the genetic coding
which we see happening and will see much more in the future.

What this article tells me is rather simple and important. Programms do what
they are told to do. There is no human element to reason nor decidions being
made, it is simply fucntions, orders which are very very predictable.

Knowledge is power of course and no one ought to have power which is why I
believe that the author's cause seems noble, namely sharing your kowledge. But
it really goes to the heart of the matter as far as the internet is concerned.

Everything is a program and programms follow orders therefore every programm
can be manipulated whether directly or inderectly to achive the desired maybe
mal intentioned results.

Hence will there ever be a proper democracy, a unity of people, a place where
the market forces do not manipulate the good intentions of the users?

Will there ever be a place where the people in general can share with each
other deserving articles, unifluenced by other motivations or bias, but the
simple desire to share worthy kowledge, I presume with the aim of advancing
civilisation itself and educating felow human beings?

The answer seems to lie not with the internet where robots (algorithms) follow
orders but with the humans themselves who are imensly much more complex and
driven by many varieties of purposes.

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eli_s
wow what what a pathetic waste of time!

