Is Digg Rigged?

Posted by Miles Evans

A couple months ago there was news of digg shutting down digggames.com in violation of its copyright name. Alright so that’s not too bad right? Everyone with a brand to protect has this right.

There was also the issue of digg removing stories that are critical of their sponsors. This was mostly bunk too.

Then we had the first allegations of block voting from a core group of diggers by CmdrTaco , the owner of Slashdot. This was pre digg version 3.0 back in april.

Alright so I had totally forgotten about the digg cabal until I noticed a story flying up digg today by JesusPhreak revealing how a cabal of diggers with high karma scores were promoting each others stories. But this time the poster gives a very detailed list of users and you can actually take a look and see which users hold the weight.

Another digger spotted this trend and commented as well today.

Shortly after the digg cabal story hit the blogosphere one of the digg top 30 users made a response. Here is a blurb:

I like to think the top 30 diggers are doing a service for Digg. We are constantly on Digg contributing and voting on stories. I do know that some people are getting upset with these type accusations as we are doing all of this for free. So before you put on your tinfoil hat think about why these people submit stories. My reasons for posting are to contribute to the site, and I like to think help make it more enjoyable for the users.

Another notable digg occurence was a situation where users were mass banned for activities offsite. Most of these bans have to do with lame group voting schemes as these digial point members found out. Even though the infractions were cheezy at best I think it's interesting to note that digg's human editors are watching what we say on and off digg.

A side note to all of this is that more and more of these criticisms tend to get removed from the digg home page by moderators as this digg user has posted. These stories are not being voted down by other digg members and do not have the this story may be innacurate tag line. I have seen this myself a few other times with stories criticizing digg so it would seem to be the unspoken policy.

I think as digg has replaced all search engine traffic for many blogs and content sites (like this one), keeping an eye on how digg polices its contributors will be something to watch.

Deep Jive has a brief history of digg controversy if you still can’t get enough.

Posted Sep 06, 2006 at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!