On ForeverGeek today, a critical post questions the ranking methodology behind Digg, a website that clusters news and links of interest from around the web. As more readers “digg” a link, that link ranks progressively higher, the idea goes. The higher a url climbs on the Digg charts, the more people end up seeing it, and so on. But critics say the site’s administrators may be skewing the system by applying their own editorial selection. Link to “Digg Corrupted: Editor’s Playground, not User-Driven Website.”
Fark.com founder Drew Curtis tells BoingBoing:
About a year and a half or so ago we added headline voting to Fark. The idea was that TFers could submit and vote on funnier headlines for articles approved to Fark’s main page that hadn’t shown up elsewhere yet.
We had to disable the feature because the funniest ones weren’t getting picked.
Social engineering self-selects the least-offensive crap right to the top. It’s a great idea but it doesn’t scale.
This isn’t the first time critics have poked around with Digg’s innards. David Johnson at RealTechNews has a 2005 post on the topic here.
A quick scan of the web doesn’t reveal any rebuttal statement from the Digg folks, but I’d welcome the opportunity to post a response here. (Thanks Drew Curtis!)
Reader comment: Andrew Fisher says,
Here is a reply on some Digg practices from founder Kevin Rose: Link.
Reader comment: And here’s a more thorough response from Kevin Rose:
Recently it was brought to our attention that several users have created accounts to mass digg and promote stories. While these accounts appear to be valid, they have in certain instances been used for automated in-order (scripted) digging. This is a violation of our terms of service and the accounts have since been banned.
As you can imagine with over 250,000 registered users (and adding thousands more per week) we are constantly monitoring and looking for user SPAM/fraud. Internally, we have several methods for detecting fraud which results in DOZENS of banned accounts per day.
The banning of forevergeek.com: Aside from the dozens of user reports, several accounts were created to artificially inflate the digg count of their stories. When a single URL hits a threshold of reports, our standard procedure is to block that URL from submission (spam control). Again, mass fraud digging is in violation of our terms of service.
Missing stories: A common question we receive is the confusion surrounding missing stories. Once a story has received enough user reports it is automatically removed from the digg queue or homepage (depending on where the story is living at that time). The number of reports required varies depending on how many diggs the story has. This system is going to change in the near future. Shortly after the next major launch of digg (v3.1), reported stories will fall into a ‘buried stories’ bin. Users will have the ability to pick through this story bin and vote to have a story reinstated should they believe it was falsely reported. Expect to see this feature in the next few months.
On a personal note: It has been pointed out that I too have dugg these fraud stories. I digg stories I enjoy reading and currently track over 40 users within digg. If it’s good content, I digg it.
Link (thanks, Andrew Fischer)