

Digg caught red handed faking ad votes? - kapauldo
http://catalyticnarrative.blogspot.com/2009/10/do-you-digg-fraudd.html

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sgk284
Are you sure this isn't just due to load balancing? You might be hitting a
different node everytime, they probably don't sync too quickly, and with the
amount of traffic digg gets, the numbers could easily vary by that much in a
fairly short period of time.

Assuming malice seems premature.

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viraptor
It should be relatively easy to prove... Poll the results for ~1 hour for all
(or front page only) stories. Generate proper statistics for the speed of
change for each entry (stddev per article per each phase - raise, sustain,
fall). If all ads jump as much as this sample, it would be quite easy to show
the difference.

Even a side-by-side graph of votes for articles and for ads should show a if
anything strange is going on. But showing a sample of size == 1 is more or
less pointless.

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ComputerGuru
I literally haven't been to digg ever since discovering HN oh so long ago...

The open, friendly, transparent process here is a very welcome relief from the
ongoing war between users and moderators, the latter of which are constantly
engaged in silently burying articles as they're submitted, blacklisting sites
just because users submit their own content, and banning users for no good
reason.

Thank god for HN :)

~~~
w1ntermute
Are you sure you don't have the two sites confused? Moderators play a lot
larger role on HN than they do on Digg, which is one of the reasons this site
is better (though it also creates the potential for it to be a lot worse).

~~~
ComputerGuru
I'm not against moderation. Read my post again clearly: it's the _transparent_
moderation that rocks.

~~~
codexon
I often click on HN stories through RSS to find the link "[dead]" with no
explanation or reason why.

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ojbyrne
Those actually have subtly different titles (except for no. 1 and no. 3, which
both have the same number of diggs). Looks to me like they just have multiple
ad units for any given advertiser.

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blhack
Does it really _matter_ if they're forging the digg count for the ads? Please
forgive my ignorance as I am not a frequent user of that website, but the ads
aren't things that naturally get put on the page, are they? The amount of
"diggs" that an ad has is irrelevant to its placement, no?

So...who cares? This is a bit like getting angry about a diner claiming that
their soup is "famous".

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morphir
are there anyone who cares about digg these days?

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blhack
Their traffic suggests that there are quite a few people that do.

~~~
morphir
could you document that traffic?

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blhack
No, sadly, I cannot. My suggestion would be to visit the website. If you do,
it is pretty obvious that they're getting quite a bit of traffic.

~~~
morphir
In what sense does this prove that they are receiving quite a bit of traffic?
I see one article,
<http://digg.com/linux_unix/Ubuntu_9_10_Karmic_Koala_released> got 1512 users,
which means we have proved that digg.com got at least 1512 unique users.
Granted, that this is not a fixed voting system of course. Secondly, how do I
quantify 'quite a bit'? I think we can settle to say that you got no proof nor
documentation that shows us the amount of traffic that digg actually got.

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admib
sssssssssssss

