How to Stop Digg-cheating, Forever

The following was written by frequent Slashdot editorial contributor Bennett Haselton. He writes "Recently author Annalee Newitz created a bit of a stir with the revelation that she had bought her way to the front page of the story-ranking site Digg. Since Digg allows any registered user to go to a story's URL and "digg it" in order to push it upward through the story-ranking system, it was inevitable that services like User/Submitter would come along, where a Digg user can pay for other users to cast votes to push their story up to the top. User/Submitter says they are currently backlogged and not taking new orders, but they say the service will return and will soon feature services for manipulating similar sites like Digg competitor reddit. Even if the new U/S features are vaporware, it probably won't be long before other companies offer similar services. But it seems like all of these story-ranking sites could prevent the manipulation by making one simple change to their voting algorithm."

Before getting to that though, what's at stake? The revelation that Digg could be trivially manipulated did not cause the site to be overrun with bogus stories all at once -- most of the links on the front page still look interesting. Newitz said that her story, which was deliberately chosen to be as lame as possible, got buried by users soon after it hit the front page, which is how Digg cleans spam stories out of the system. However, she also said that in the time that the story was on the front page, the story got about 35,000 hits, whereupon her server crashed and the traffic was thereafter divided with two other mirror sites; presumably if the server had stayed up, she would have gotten about 100,000 hits, all for an initial expenditure of $100, which is orders of magnitude cheaper than buying advertising any other way. (If she had done the same thing with a good story instead of a deliberately lame one, presumably the traffic gains resulting from word-of-mouth and repeat visitors would have been even higher.) As long as the benefits outweigh the cost, more and more unscrupulous users are likely to pay for such services, and since the service provided by User/Submitter is easy to copy, probably similar services will spring up to drive the price down even further. If nothing changes, then eventually sites like Digg and reddit will be flooded with nothing but paid stories. Most of the stories on the front page will probably still be interesting (why would you pay to promote a link, unless it was good enough to draw repeat visitors and get the most value for your money?), but everybody who didn't pay for votes would eventually get crowded out.

One Good Samaritan, Jim Messenger, managed to shut down one Digg manipulation service called Spike The Vote, by buying it out (for a paltry $1,275 - they must have wanted to get out fast) and then turning over to Digg. He warned people that the moral was: Don't sign up for Digg manipulation services, since Digg might get your information from them and then you'll be banned. Actually, I think the moral is simpler: if you're going to try anything like that, do it from a throwaway account that you don't care about losing if you get caught. (Or, only sign up with manipulation services which publish a privacy policy promising never to share your information, especially not with sites like Digg. Then if Digg buys them out, then the site has violated their privacy policy and Digg as the new owner inherits the liability for that, so you can sue them, right?) But as the idea spreads, it will probably become impractical to play whack-a-mole by shutting down manipulation services as they keep springing up. Any time the cost of providing a service (clicking on a few buttons) is small compared to the benefits of receiving the service (100,000 hits in 24 hours), a market will exist for it one way or another, whether you're talking about drug-smuggling, prostitution, or selling Digg votes.

However, I think there's a way to fix it, and here it is. Have you ever seen people put a link in their profile to their HotOrNot picture, saying "Go here and vote me a 10!!"? Similar to the people who send links to their friends and say, "I just posted this, please Digg this for me!" The difference is that on HotOrNot, it doesn't work. On HotOrNot, you can cast votes for a picture in one of two ways. The first way is to go directly to the URL for someone's picture; the second way is to load the front page, where a random picture from the database is selected at random, and vote for whatever picture comes up. The catch is that the votes that you cast by going directly to someone's picture, are simply ignored in calculating the average score for that photo. The only votes that are counted are the votes cast for random pictures displayed on the front page. So if you want to manipulate the voting for your own photo, you'd have to load the front page hundreds of thousands of times waiting for your own picture to come up repeatedly, which is hard to do without being detected.

To enable an algorithm like this on Digg and reddit, the sites could present users with a sidebar box that displays random stories from the pool of recent submissions. (reddit already has a serendipity feature that users can use to select a random story from the available pool, which could be leveraged for this purpose.) Once a story has collected, say, 100 votes -- or whatever number is considered sufficient to provide a representative random sample of how the story appeals to people -- then on that basis the story can either be buried or promoted to the top, where it would be seen by, say, 100,000 people. The elegance of this system is that bad content would only be seen by 100 people on average before it's buried, whereas good content would be seen by all the 100,000 people who view it on the front page, so the average user sees 1,000 pieces of good content for every 1 piece of crap. Even if 75% of users ignore the random story box completely, that just means you have to display it to 400 users instead of 100 before you have enough data points for a good random sample.

I suggested essentially the same algorithm for how an open-source search engine could work without being vulnerable to gaming even by those who understood all of its inner workings. The main difference, of course, is that Digg and reddit actually exist now. Digg declined to comment on the possible merits of such an algorithm; reddit's Steve Huffman said that the idea sounded interesting, although even if the idea got full buy-in, naturally any proposed change would take a long time to bring to fruition.

But it seems that an algorithm similar to this one would be the only way to prevent cheating on sites like Digg that sort content based on user votes. So it's ironic that HotOrNot, the only site I know of that is using a variation of this algorithm and hence is probably the most secure against cheating, is also the one where cheating is least likely to be a problem. Getting a high placement on Digg might enable you to make some money, but getting a highly rated picture on HotOrNot isn't going to make you rich (unless it helps you meet a millionaire who is using the site to find his third wife). Also, making HotOrNot meritocratic doesn't give people an incentive to improve the "content" that they submit, because up to the limits of what can be done with hair and wardrobe, you can't make yourself that much more attractive. With Digg and reddit, on the other hand, I might work harder at submitting a good story, if I knew that it worked in a perfectly meritocratic fashion that pushed good stories right to the top.

If you do this, you don't need any of the other countermeasures listed in Annalee Newitz's follow-up piece "Herding the Mob", such as analyzing user account history for suspicious behavior. As long as most users in the system are legitimate, most of the users in your random sample will be legitimate as well, and their voting will be representative of what most of the community would think. A story could also get a high score within a specific sub-area of the site like the sports page, but kept off of the main site front page, if the story got a high score from a random sampling of sports-oriented users but a low score from a sample of everyone else.

You could even sub-divide the topical areas further, down to a level of granularity like "Would Barack Obama make a good president?" A site called Helium is currently trying something like this -- users can submit essays on subjects like "Racial inequality or oppression: Do they truly exist in todays society?", and vote on how to rank other essays against each other. The voting works on the random selection principle that I'm advocating here -- users are presented with a pair of randomly chosen essays from a given category (not necessarily the same category for which you submitted an essay) and told to vote for the better one, so there's no way to tell all your friends to go to the link for your essay and give it a high rating. The main limitation though is that while the votes can push you to the top of a particular sub-category, that won't cause your article to "break out" and get to the front page of the site -- Helium says that those front-page articles are chosen at random by employees from the among those articles that are highly rated within their narrow category, so just being good is not enough. And if you want to write something that doesn't fit into any existing categories, you have to create a new category for your essay like I did, which will then be a category containing one essay that nobody else ever sees. Perhaps both of these limitations could be overcome by adding the option to rate randomly selected essays on a scale of 1 to 10 -- thus providing a way to rate essays that exist alone in their own category, and also a way to find the best essays across the entire site, rated against each other.

If Digg or reddit adopts a model that uses the random-voter-selection method, then there's the issue of how to handle the votes cast by users under the current system -- the ones who go to a story link and click "digg it", which is what makes the existing system vulnerable to gaming. Digg could do what HotOrNot does, and just ignore those votes outright, but users would probably view this as deceptive. Perhaps Digg could say that votes cast by self-selected users (the ones who go straight to the story link) are counted along with votes from randomly-selected users, unless the average of the self-selected votes is significantly different from the average from the randomly-selected votes, in which case the self-selected votes are ignored. Hopefully this would satisfy most users and preserve the "community" feel of the site, and only a spoilsport would point out that counting the self-selected votes only if they agree with the randomly-selected votes, is exactly the same thing as ignoring the self-selected votes entirely.

I asked the owner of User/Submitter what he thought about this. He was willing to talk with surprising candor (except about things like his real name) and spoke as if he'd like nothing better than for Digg to make changes to their service that would block his system from working. To both Annalee Newitz and me, he said, "We find it interesting that Digg still allows anybody to view any user's diggs. By way of this 'feature,' User/Submitter is able to verify that our users actually digg the stories they're given. Without this feature, Digg users are given complete digging privacy, and User/Submitter cannot exist." Some have expressed skepticism that the Digg cheaters really want Digg to fix the problem. But as a security tester, I can understand that mentality. If you report a problem, and a company doesn't fix it, eventually you get tempted to publicize the problem to draw attention to it. And if they still don't fix it, and it's a fairly benign security hole that merely enables some pranksters to get some undeserved attention, why not build a service around exploiting the hole, if will highlight the problem and encourage it to get fixed?

So I'm going to go out on a limb and say the U/S guy sincerely wants Digg to be more secure. However I disagree with him about his proposed fix, that of hiding a user's digg history. First of all, it won't stop anyone who creates a multitude of accounts all under their control -- you can use Tor to make it appear that you're coming from many different IP addresses, and build up a history of "legitimate" votes before using your votes to push sites deliberately. (Be sure to use different browsers, or vary your User-Agent header if you know how to do that, so that a series of votes from identical browser types doesn't give you away.) If your service does work by paying other users to cast votes, then you could still audit whether they're casting their votes honestly -- for example, create a test story, use 5 sockpuppet accounts to digg it 5 times, then tell your confederate to digg it. If the number of diggs doesn't go up to 6, then you know they're not honoring their end of the deal, and kick them out of the system. As long as most confederates think there might be some chance of getting caught if they don't play along, most of them would probably cast the votes that they were paid for, since it costs them nothing to do so and they wouldn't want to jeopardize their stream of easy money.

I asked the owner of User/Submitter if his service could defeat the random-sampling algorithm I described. "It would slow down our service," he answered, "but certainly wouldn't eliminate it because eventually a U/S User will have an opportunity to vote on a U/S Submission by way of chance." But I don't see how this would beat the algorithm -- some U/S voters would still get to vote on the story, but as long as there are far more legitimate voters than U/S voters, then a random sampling will almost always contain far more legitimate voters. The U/S owner also said, "Randomized voting privileges would be unnecessarily confusing, frustrating, and fragmenting. Not to forget: unfair and undemocratic." Well, you could keep it from being "confusing" or "frustrating" by keeping the existing interface (with the possible addition of a randomly-selected-story box), so that the only changes would be in how the votes are handled under the hood. "Fragmenting"? If anything, it seems to me that the existing Digg/reddit algorithms would be more fragmenting, keeping users within their existing communities of friend who vote for each others' stories; a random-selection box would give stories with "crossover appeal" a greater chance of success, bringing them to the attention of users who might otherwise never have seen them. As for "unfair and undemocratic", presumably this is a reaction to the fact that the votes of 100 users decide what everyone else sees. But it's already the case with Digg that the votes of a small number of users decide what content becomes popular. At least with a random sample of users, it would be the case that the vast majority of the time, the voting outcome would be the same as it would have been if the entire site had voted, due to the magic of representative sampling.

So, I'm putting this suggestion out there for the same reason that Jim Messenger bought out Spike The Vote -- because I don't want sites like Digg and reddit to be manipulated by the abusers. In fact, if they used this algorithm, they would become more meritocratic than they are now, because the systems would strictly favor the highest-rated content, instead of content written by people who have informal networks of friends who can all go digg their stories for them. If I were to design the user rating system to make it cheat-proof, these are the exact details of what I would do:

• Wherever they decide to post the "random story sampling" box (on the front page, or on a link off to a separate page, etc.), have it work so that as soon as new stories are submitted, they can be rotated into that box and displayed to a random set of users, until it's reached its total of 100 votes or however many are required to get a random sample.
• You can have "shutout voting" to kill off stories early that are obvious spam or otherwise really useless, without going through the full 100 votes. (For example, if 90% of the first 10 votes are negative, then stop collecting votes.) This decreases the number of users "inconvenienced" by really obvious spam and other garbage.
• For someone to submit content that gets rotated into that voting process, have them submit a Turing test (read numbers off of a graphic and type them in), or something similar. This prevents spammers from submitting spam content over and over just to have it viewed by those initial 10 voters. If they have to type in a number each time, it's not worth it.
• When users give votes to a story, give them the option to say why they voted the way that they did. (This is especially valuable if they're giving negative votes, then the submitter would know what to improve.) Personally I think the comments would be more valuable if each user can't see other users' comments, at the time they submit their own comments; this prevents the "me too" effect where everybody echoes the first two commenters. (When I ask for independent comments from people, and they almost all say the same thing without seeing each other's comments, that's when I know they have a point!)
• To prevent an attacker from having their own username hit the random-voting page over and over in hopes of voting up their own content, make sure that each user account is only allowed to vote on a given piece of content once (even if they found the content through the random-story page).
• Require a Turing test for new user signups. This would prevent an attacker from registering a huge number of accounts just to hit the random voting page with different users over and over, in hopes getting to vote on their own submitted content eventually.

Then after running this system for a while, look through some collected data to determine if the system could be more efficient. For example, do you really need a sample of 100 votes every time? Suppose you determine that in 99% of cases, you get the same result just from tabulating the first 50 votes, as you would have gotten from tabulating all 100 votes. Then you could modify the system to collect only the first 50 votes, and then make a decision.

Suggestions for improvement? Flaws (hopefully not fatal)? Everyone who cares about keeping community sites like Digg free from abuse, and who wants to create a path for the best content to rise to the top, let's put our heads together and see what we can think of. The above is intended merely as a jumping-off point, and although I've worked it over and I can't see any specific points to improve efficiency, that's probably just because I've been looking at it too long. And if you Digg this story for me I'll give you 1,000 times as much cash as I gave my Mom last Mother's Day.

Comments

There's a cheaper way

[kentrel]

This is what I like about slashdot. I can get my stories on the front page just by doing sexual favours for the administrators. No need to spend my hard earned geek money.

Re:There's a cheaper way

[goombah99]

That's why they call it the fire hose.

Of course more seriously, presumably the firehose voting can be rigged too.

Re:There's a cheaper way

[Rogerborg]

Wait - how are you typing this; trip-trip-trapping over the keyboard with your cloven hooves, or butting with your horns?

Re:There's a cheaper way

[Notquitecajun]

Emailing pictures of Greta Garbo you copied from your hard-drive doesn't count as "sexual favors."

Then again, around here it might.

Re:There's a cheaper way

[ack154]

"Ya, all I had to do was suck it out of a hose."

Re:There's a cheaper way

[john g the 4th]

Ah, sexual favors... This whole time I've relied on half-assed written reports of stories of mild interest. Though I'm still puzzled as to why my article on the guy who got drunk and wrestled a shark was denied... thats media gold.

Re:There's a cheaper way

[fuliginous]

Fire hose sampling to be fair has to still take a fair distribution of votes. If there was not a bias passed through the voting system then no story would make it to the top and therefore any increased frequency of votes for one story will still be passed through.

The only thing that might work in favour is that the sampling skews the timing of vote registering. So if over ten hours one thousand votes are passed and they are vaguely passed evenly in time a rush of paid voting in one of those hours will be wasted.

Digg Down

[maddskillz]

Is there any way to digg this article down?

Re:Digg Down

[Rik Sweeney]

Is there any way to digg this article down?

Yes: make sure that it's clear, concise, factually correct and that the masses don't agree with what you've written.

Re:Digg Down

[gEvil (beta)]

I know this was a joke, but yes, you can. Go to the Firehose and click the TiVo-patented red thumbs-down button.

Re:Digg Down

[doktorjayd]

oblig simpsons:

homer: 'i know, we'll digg our way out!

wiggum: 'no, no, digg up stupid'

Re:Digg Down

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the Digg system, where the mod categories are "+1 Popular" and "-1 Unpopular."

Re:Digg Down

[jZnat]

Some people above mentioned that you can use the Firehose to vote it down, but a lazier way is to do what voting down does in the first place: tag it with nix. nod is the tag for voting up by the way.

A good design

[ma11achy]

This just goes to show how a well designed platform (in this case, a moderation system) can
stand the test of time, and the masses.

Kudos to slashdot.

Re:A good design

[networkBoy]

Or, to combat the moderation services, just sell the top two positions (ala google) and be done with it.
People can preference it out as it could have the topic :paid: or dis-allow that and risk alienating part of your user base.
revenue and it neuters the outside manipulators.
-nB

Re:A good design

[Anonymous Coward]

Roland? Is that you?

Re:A good design

[Hijacked Public]

If by that you mean 'enforce the groupthink' then you are correct.

Slashdot's readership tends to mod up posts they agree with and mod down those they don't, regardless of whether the posts actually further the discussion on the topic. Of course the editors can manipulate that to ensure that the site stays on topic and appeals to the target demographic. I am not claiming that this is a bad thing but the system certainly doesn't just run itself, nor does it generate any real discussion of anything.

I am probably less emotionally invested in my online personality that most people but Slashdot has plenty of users who will respond to their own posts complaining about some moderation they have received. I don't see why it matters to anyone. A person could create a new account and quickly build excellent karma by recycling highly rated old comments from previous stories, never even having to think up a post on their own. There are more than enough moderators who just want to see things they agree with rise to the top regardless of whether they are getting their blocks trolled off.

That, lame jokes, and endless learning by metaphor is really what drives the site.

Re:A good design

[BunnyClaws]

Amen! The moderation system works much better here. The only drawback would be the Karma whores.

Re:A good design

[dancingmad]

This just goes to show how a well designed platform (in this case, a moderation system) can
stand the test of time, and the masses.

While this maybe true, digg's voting is also very poweful (and I say this as someone who has had a slashdot account for a long time and checks it far more than digg). As mentioned in the editorial, bogus or lame stories get buried pretty quickly. Compare to slashdot's games section where Zonk's "stories," which either don't explain what he's talking about, are obviously slanted, are poor (and late) reviews or are posts in which Zonk simply didn't RTFA and flubs details remain standing. While these get corrected in comments (and if you browse with highest rated comments first, they will show up at the top) I feel that Zonk's posts would get buried quickly on digg.

Re:A good design

[Marcion]

>Slashdot's readership tends to mod up posts they agree with and mod down those they don't, regardless of whether the posts actually further the discussion on the topic.

Well sometimes, especially when there is no real news happening, the discussions on gun control or whatever are often more interesting than TFA.

>Of course the editors can manipulate that to ensure that the site stays on topic

I hope not, that is a very colonial view of what the topic is.

Re:A good design

[Lockejaw]

Slashdot's readership tends to mod up posts they agree with and mod down those they don't, regardless of whether the posts actually further the discussion on the topic.

I won't say Slashdot doesn't have that tendency, but... have you ever been to Digg?
Any time I start to feel like Slashdot's moderation system is messed up, I either go to metamod (and do what I can to fix it) or to Digg (and then run screaming back to Slashdot).

Re:A good design

[stunt_penguin]

I'm using the same kind of solution for a photo competition website I'm setting up. The site is for a photographer's association (about 500 members), each of whom will enter a number of photos, and then judge fellow member's entries. It's a bit like the CGSociety competitions.

To ensure that you can't have other members simply go to the site vote up your work at your request I'll have the site present 20 random images to each member for their 'official' judging input; each image will be judged on a scale ( probably 1-10 or 1-100 )and require a given number of votes before the score can be judged as fair and the image's final score calculated.

I'll have to see see how I get on, but I think the system should be fair, assuming high enough number of votes for the number of images (2-3 votes per image isn't enough, 15-20 should give a nice reliable indicator). Anyone got any experience or opinions they'd like to share on the subject?

Re:A good design

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, I do not frequent Digg. What is the appeal of getting your story to the top? Is there a group of people that consider you elite if you have top stories? Is the only motivation to reach the top the fact that this random group of unknown people will think you are elite? Wow, look at me and what I acomplished. Seems rather odd to me.
I guess everyone wants to stand out above the crowd. I am confused about people giving the effort to work their way to the top of this Digg crowd. Specially since that crowd only knows you by your username and they only see you when they are actively browsing around in Digg.
Do the content of the stories actually mean anything to anyone? The whole concept seems strange to me and how someone gets satisfaction from this. Maybe I'm too old and someone a little younger can explain it to me.

I do understand the financial side of it from those looking for hits from the stories themselves but from what I've read about Digg, there are many individuals that spend a lot of time to reach this elite status where linkage and funds are not the motive.

Re:A good design

[jfengel]

It does happen, but I've found in my own experience that I'm often modded up for posts counter to the Slashthink.

I hold (or at least, express on Slashdot) contrarian views on several issues. I try to express them reasonably and politely, and find that I'm often moderated up for those posts, even though most of the other posts express the opposite views. It's as though there's a large but fairly silent majority on those issues, people with enough karma to have mod points.

Yeah, some days I get moderated down well under water before that happens (usually when I'm being too snide or to subtle in my sarcasm), but that's not often, and my karma can take it.

I can't guarantee that any particular posting will survive the whims of the moderators, but it seems to me that a whole view is rarely suppressed: somebody's similar postings will be modded up. (If you're the only one on Slashdot who thinks a particular way, then you're probably wrong about whatever it is. There's always somebody out there who agrees with you unless you're batshit crazy.)

I think that the proof of the pudding is in the eating: I find that although the Slashthink often infuriates me, there are enough insightful comments that it's worth going in to many articles. That's especially true when I feel there's something missing in the story, e.g. some energy breakthrough which I'm certain is overplayed but I don't know why.

Re:A good design

[RingDev]

Hey, I am a Karma whore you insensitive clod!

-Rick

Re:A good design

[alvinrod]

For as many problems as Slashdot may have, things are exponentially worse on sites like Digg. Digg is a great site in its own way, but for actual information I generally tend to come to Slashdot knowing that I can expect to find insightful comments and a knowledgeable community that generally has something to add to the discussion. While there are certain people who will moderate poorly, through the meta-moderation system there is the chance that this will be recognized and stopped.

There are also a number of other tools that Slashdot offers that can help you while browsing the comments. Don't like reading the Soviet Russia and Futurama reference jokes? Just change your preferences so that comments moderated as funny are weighted less heavily. If you find a user that seems to get moderated insightful for comments that you feel are trolls, add him as a foe and weigh such posts less heavily. The simple fact that there are options like this on Slashdot make it so much better than other sites when it comes to the quality of comments.

The only other than I can do is to encourage you to be a good moderator. Maybe there's something you agree with or find interesting, but it's already been moderated as such so it might be more worthwhile to sink your points somewhere else. The simple fact of the matter is that any system implemented, no matter how good on paper, is still at the mercy of people who don't always tend to act rightly. Slashdot will never be perfect, but I enjoy it for what it is, and that's why I continue to come here.

Re:A good design

[Bri3D]

I've seen a lot of contrarian posts modded up just for being contrarian. It works even better if you put a "I'm sure I'll get modded down for this" into the post, in order to make mods think that by modding down your post they're somehow being intolerant.

I'm sure I'll get modded down for this.

Re:A good design

[Anonymous Coward]

If by that you mean 'enforce the groupthink' then you are correct.

I agree. I think one of the best examples of groupthink is slashdot's hatred of groupthink.

Re:A good design

['nother poster]

Since I don't get paid for it I guess I'm actually a karma slut.

Re:A good design

[try_anything]

Slashdot's readership tends to mod up posts they agree with and mod down those they don't

Because of the mod categories and metamoderation, Slashdotters mostly express their opinions by modding up rather than down. Often this results in the best posts for each point of view being rated +4 or +5 -- an excellent result that makes it worthwhile to read at +4 and +5 when you don't have much time.

Re:A good design

[Anonymous Coward]

People dont care if they're waving a flag for the establishment or for the anti-establishment. As long as they're waving a flag.

Re:A good design

[sacrilicious]

That, lame jokes, and endless learning by metaphor is really what drives the site.

What's the problem, I never metaphor I didn't like! (nyuck nyuck.) But seriously, a community site without metaphors is a train wreck waiting to happen.

Re:A good design

[dc29A]

While this maybe true, digg's voting is also very poweful (and I say this as someone who has had a slashdot account for a long time and checks it far more than digg). As mentioned in the editorial, bogus or lame stories get buried pretty quickly.

Adios karma!

As an ex-Digg user, I noticed a totally different trend. These days the top stories are lame videos or pictures. Digg is no longer about news, it's about what people think are cool videos and pictures. Digg is worthless to find news. Not to mention the comment section, I lose 20 IQ every time I read something there. At least on Slashdot you can find interesting stories and some very insightful commentaries. Digg also has zillions of blog spams, people posting their worthless blog posts where they link another article and whatnot.

Digg has almost no content worth reading.

Re:A good design

[Darktyco]

You just made a contrary post and got modded up for it, what is your secret?

Re:A good design

[Afecks]

but it seems to me that a whole view is rarely suppressed

Very rarely but it does happen. An example is the article about Blizzard in a legal battle with cheat makers. Even though Blizzard is attacking fair use, many people didn't care simply because they are tired of cheaters.

Re:A good design

[TopherC]

I haven't been moderating Slashdot comments recently, mostly because I don't feel like I can take the time to be fair about it. Maybe something along the lines of the article's suggestion would help. I don't think moderators should have their posts filtered by moderation. But then there are too many posts to read. So perhaps a moderator should be given a random sample of posts to moderate? Unfortunately you couldn't judge duplicates that way, and there would have to be some way of seeing parent posts. Moderators also could not judge whether or not a post is a duplicate. But I don't think that happens well enough as it is, so there's little harm in taking a broken feature and making it worse. Slashdot could also boost the frequency of appearance of newer posts, or better yet make posts with the least number of moderator views are the most likely to be selected. Someone in their profile could choose how many random posts to view when moderating.

I know, none of this resolves the problem that people tend to mod up posts that they agree with, as apposed to posts that are well-motivated but disagreeable. But that's deeply-rooted human nature -- people love to hear about how right they are -- and I can't imagine how any automated system could compensate. At the least Slashdot could check for internal plagarism without too much trouble, given enough CPU cycles.

Re:A good design

[Afrosheen]

Not to mention a proper threading system. I've been Digging for years and I still can't stand or even understand their piss-poor threading implementation.

Re:A good design

[jfengel]

Do you have a link to that? I'm not sure which article you're referring to.

Re:A good design

[orgelspieler]

Just wait a couple of days, I'm sure it will come up again.

Re:A good design

[frenetic3]

that's actually a fantastic idea (paid stories in a separate box on the right like AdWords), and would let these social news sites monetize without being annoying or shady, in the same way that organic and paid search are divided.

it seems like a no brainer. why haven't digg/reddit et al done this already?

-fren

Re:A good design

[jZnat]

Slashdot's threading system screws up once you get past the fifth child (i.e., great great great grandchild), but it's still stored properly so that if you view a post, it will show you up to 6 levels of children before screwing up again. Now for as annoying as this is, it is still millions of times better than the lack of threading at Digg.

Re:A good design

[Sancho]

The easiest way to abuse the moderation system is simply social engineering, and no matter how good your algorithms are, it's going to be hard to prevent that kind of 'attack'.

Of course, I'll probably get modded down for saying this.

(hint: that was an example)

Re:A good design

[shmlco]

Google has paid advertising, and people still try to game the natural search system. Adding paid placement to digg means that some people will buy placement... and everyone else will still try to game the system.

Re:A good design

[shmlco]

Be sure to post "recent" photos on which users can vote, otherwise people will vote on the entire pool, including photos left there three years ago.

Re:A good design

[Anonymous Coward]

On Digg comments get buried, on Slashdot comments get outright deleted.

Re:A good design

[StikyPad]

Meta-moderation is far from perfect. In fact, I'd argue that it's even more open to abuse due to the fact that almost most everyone can participate. Personlly, I only spend mod points to mod things up which have been overlooked, or mod things down which are factually incorrect, but have been modded up. Despite this, much of my moderation was undone in metamod, and I no longer get mod points. Of course, I have nothing except my word as evidence, but I'd be surprised if I was alone in my experience.

Re:A good design

[stunt_penguin]

Oh, ah yes of course; well in this case it's a specific, month-long competition that we'll be running so the judging is on a specific set of photos that have recently been posted. Hmm, wonder if we should allow general rating......

Thanks :)

Re:A good design

[Megane]

Not to mention those Overrated mods that for some stupid reason still aren't part of the meta-moderation system, and are therfore easily subject to abuse.

I think there are lots of moderation abusers out there, who metamod capriciously, and who only mod things down using Overrated.

Re:A good design

[Hijacked Public]

I like metaphors and analogies as well, but they can get quickly out of hand here.

Someone posts a car analogy. Someone replies with what they feel is an even more accurate car analogy. Someone replies to that stating that airplanes provide a yet better example. All of this on the topic of file formats or the like, which anyone calling himself a geek should be able to understand without having to resort to metaphor or analogy.

Web 2.0 flawed

[Larus]

Flamebait as it is, the idea of users as co-producers can wreck havoc on a system. Think the early days of general democracy, where people change clothes and shave faces in order to vote for their favorite thug again.

Re:Web 2.0 flawed

[The Wicked Priest]

I don't understand your analogy. Are you suggesting that a) monarchs were not generally thugs, or b) modern elected politicians are not generally thugs? Because I'm not sure I'd agree with either one.

Modern monarchs aren't generally thugs, but only because they have no power anymore.

Do people actually read digg for news?

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Or is it mostly visited by people just trying to get their "story" on the front page?

Re:Do people actually read digg for news?

[nonsequitor]

I read Digg on a daily basis first thing in the morning and again at lunch time for news stories I may not see elsewhere. I Digg, Bury, or consciously do not vote on each of the most popular stories. Sometimes, rarely, I even submit a story. So I guess the answer would be "Yes, Digg is still as revelant as it once was."

Of course I also read Fark, Slashdot, and CNN.com everyday too, so what do I know.

Re:Do people actually read digg for news?

[CheddarHead]

Come on! Digg is full of interesting and relevant news stories. Well... Assuming that you find photoshop tutorials and 20 year old Apple new interesting and relevant.

On a not unrelated note

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you please block Bennett Haselton's exploitation of the system here by getting him his own editor account, so I can filter out his long, self-aggrandizing, pointless diatribes?

tl;dr

[fatduck]

I think a better system would promote discussion over the actual articles, and perhaps form a culture in which reading the article itself is considered unnecessary. This negates most of the benefits of site-whoring (ad revenue). Maybe even build some sort of community moderation system to control the flow of discussion and keep interesting, insightful, and occasionally humorous posts at the top while limiting out posts of poorer quality.

Re:tl;dr

[nine-times]

I don't think that would ever work. I mean... maybe, let's say if you somehow marketed it towards obsessive geeks who'd actually waste their time all day writing comments, moderating, and then what? You'd need a way to moderate the community moderation system, like some sort of meta-moderation. Who'd be a big enough loser to spend their time that way?

Not me. I'm not going to waste my time arguing about inconsequential topics on some dumb geeky community website.

Re:tl;dr

[dmsuperman]

They have this already, it's called "Slashdot". No one reads the articles here, and as for moderating the posts we all do that is it stands.

Re:tl;dr

[zugurudumba]

Right, someone should create such a thing. We could even call it Sla... Oh, wait...

Re:tl;dr

[Lord Bitman]

Congratulations! You almost got the joke!

Re:tl;dr

[mabhatter654]

For starts this is a big "told you so" to Kevin from CmdrTaco... Kevin originally approached Taco about adding what would become Digg to Slashdot and Taco said it would never work... Both were wrong! Digg does work but would be much better if it took from Slashdot's experiences. This whole post is about the Digg/Slashdot p*** match. oh well, it gets page hits!

back OT, Digg's focus is to "Digg" around on the internet and find interesting stuff. Where Slashdot is about Quality, Digg is all about Quantity and cleverness. I find myself on Digg more (to follow the links than to discuss) because Slashdot has slowed down.. every time somebody post Lego robots, or weird news, etc (the "news for nerds" part of the slogan!) it gets flamed as "stupid" or not a "relevant" issue to the Slashdot (stuff that matters) "agenda". I've noticed from Firehose that clever quirky stuff just isn't making front page anymore even if it gets hits.

I'd say each site has it's place. In a lot of ways Digg "gaming" doesn't hurt if it doesn't happen too much as it's usually interesting stuff if somebody wants it there enough to go to all that work. On the other hand, Slashdot has better discussion. Slashdot has that cool factor of actual industry insiders that will show up and post... that's way cool and they only do it because Slashdot has that history. If Slashdot wants to remain "relevant" there's the ticket... get more actual people from the industry to post, answer questions, etc... that's where the NEWS really is.

Re:tl;dr

[nasch]

Which is actually much funnier than someone who did get the joke. :-)

Re:tl;dr

[aftk2]

Jesus...while reading the responses to this post, I've come to the conclusion that Slashbots above the 1,000,000 user ID have had their humor bit defaulted to OFF.

Re:tl;dr

[dosquatch]

Ohhhh, so close! You even almost kinda figured out what that "whooshing" sound was. It's kinda like holding a lottery ticket where every number is one digit off from winning, isn't it?

Re:tl;dr

[nuzak]

> Kevin originally approached Taco about adding what would become Digg to Slashdot

Half-Empty was doing "everybody votes" years before Digg was even thought of (even doing it AJAX-style before the buzzword was coined -- I remember being impressed by that). And I'm sure .5e wasn't the first to think of such a blindingly obvious idea either.

I'd like to see a snippets site using reddit-style voting and an advogato-style trust metric. I'd build it myself but for two reasons:

1) It'd be unaffordable to host unless I somehow "monetized" it, and I don't want to start a business

2) Content is only as good as the community. You cannot create a quality community with technology alone.

3) I'm lazy (yes, that's the third of two reasons)

As for slashdot remaining relevant: I think not falling over with 503 errors every minute might be somewhat important to retaining visitors.

Re:tl;dr

[_Sprocket_]

For starts this is a big "told you so" to Kevin from CmdrTaco... Kevin originally approached Taco about adding what would become Digg to Slashdot and Taco said it would never work... Both were wrong! Digg does work but would be much better if it took from Slashdot's experiences. This whole post is about the Digg/Slashdot p*** match. oh well, it gets page hits!

Sure - there might be some underlying emotional / personal investment involved in this particular case. However... it does also touch on a grander thing.

There's been this idea out there that started somewhere around the The Cluetrain Manifesto and is often an undercurrent to "Web 2.0". The concept is that advertising is going to change in this new environment ushered in by the Internet. And somewhere in this change is a more honest line of communication between seller and consumer. Old media advertising elements and strategies need not apply.

This particular event and associated article indicates that old media strategies are simply dawning a more subtle sheep suit. In the past, advertisers moved from the jingle and sponsored TV spokespeople to heavily stylized commercials and product placements. Likewise, advertisers are shifting strategies to deal with more cynical marks in a new environment. The mechanics required to keep old-style marketing moving on the Internet are being created... and are offered today.

Beyond any personal disagreement between CmdrTaco and Kevin Rose is the realization that marketers have adapted. And if you wish for your platform to be a element of change, you also must adapt. Let the arms race continue anew.

Re:tl;dr

[kchrist]

Where Slashdot is about Quality

Sorry, I couldn't get past this part. Pass the crack pipe, would you?

Where does Apple and Google

[Anonymous Coward]

go to buy all the fluffpieces about themselves that are on slashdot then?

Re:Where does Apple and Google

[Anonymous Coward]

go to buy all the fluffpieces about themselves that are on slashdot then?

I don't know.

How much sodium is in this package of potato chips I'm holding?

that's great

[hyperstation]

now tell me how to get rid of all these Slashvertisements

How to Destroy the Competition, Slashdot Style

[timholman]

(1) Learn that one of your competitors can be easily manipulated to make its front page results 100% spam.

(2) As a "courtesy" to the community, post an article on Slashdot announcing this fact, describing the technique in detail, and offering a solution that will almost certainly be ignored by your competitor.

(3) Rub your hands in satisfaction as thousands more spammers are now made aware how easy it is to manipulate the competition.

(4) Watch the competition crash and burn as its signal to noise ratio plummets to zero.

(5) Profit!

Re:How to Destroy the Competition, Slashdot Style

[jimstapleton]

you forgot the "???" in your to-do list.

Re:How to Destroy the Competition, Slashdot Style

[Minter92]

I don't think digg is competition for slashdot. Slashdot is a tech/science news website designed to facilitate discussion and community. Digg is a hoard of thirteen year olds posting stupid videos led by a drunken man.

Re:How to Destroy the Competition, Slashdot Style

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, so /. doesn't have the videos...

Re:How to Destroy the Competition, Slashdot Style

[Mr 44]

You're thinking of Fark...

Re:How to Destroy the Competition, Slashdot Style

[jZnat]

And ever since that horrible re-"design" a few days ago (along with admin/moderator drama that always ensues from sites like Fark), a lot of Farkers (including many, many TFers) went to Digg for refuge. So, I'd have to say that Digg is the next Fark, but hopefully without the idiotic administration.

And?

[mcpkaaos]

she had bought her way to the front page of the story-ranking site Digg

What's that about a fool and his/her money? I fail to see the point of cheating to get on the front page of a site with even less intelligent discourse than Slashdot.

Re:And?

[ScentCone]

I fail to see the point of cheating to get on the front page of a site with even less intelligent discourse than Slashdot.

Leaving aside for the moment that it probably wasn't all that expensive... there are financial incentives for getting eyeballs on content. It can, through various mechanisms, increase the apparent credibility of a site, and thus eventually your Google rankings... it can rather immediately produce a shot of impression stats and AdSense revenue, and so on. It can also make the "author" of an article about how it was done more credible as a consultant for both the manipulators and manipulatees in such scenarios. And, putting aside all of those rational reasons: some people are just vain and like to see their name appear on someone else's web site. People spend money and time in much greater amounts for wildly sillier reasons just to feel some fake love from a crowd to which they feel some tenuous affinity. But I'm guessing it's more about the other reasons I cite, above.

Re:And?

[db32]

I would say that is money well spent. After having been around the net for more than a few years now I would say "a site with even less intelligent discourse than Slashdot" is actually evidence that MORE people are reading/responding.

Digg Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

In the beginning, digg was a neat site with tech news, but once they opened the floodgates with politics (sound familiar?), it has gone to shit. The site is now filled with loony wackjobs pushing their pet conspiracy theories, impeachment bullshit, and black-helicopter rantings.

The concept of digg is good in theory, but once you let the inmates run the asylum, the game is over.

Re:Digg Sucks

[Opportunist]

but once you let the inmates run the asylum, the game is over.

Can't we get one story done without drifting towards discussing politics?

Re:Digg Sucks

[fermion]

I agree with this, and it points to what may be the overwhelming issue. The problem with any particular publication, online or off, is not the ability to manipulate the stories or otherwise blur the line between original and advertising content, but if the publications meet the need of the people who use it. Some publications are 100% advertising, and people pay for it. Some publications are more sensitive to paid content

The question is then do the readers of digg care if content is paid or not? It really sounds like the primary concern is that the content is interesting, and if the content is not, it will quickly be buried. Sure, some money might be made in the process, but profit is perhaps the best reason to change a model. Perhaps Digg readers will get better stories, and less politics, if more content is promoted in this way. As the article stated, the biggest danger of paid promotion is that it will push other content out. This also means that in the absence of paid promotion, the best and brightest might be pushed out for the drivel that the masses enjoy, like Star Search and it's progeny American Idol.

In any case the most interesting part of the article was at the very bottom. If the digg accounts are private, there would be no way to know if a user was actually voting an item up, and the entire paid promotion gig would be up.

Re:Digg Sucks

[FreeGamer]

That's why they have categories, so just pay attention to the tech-related categories.

Re:Digg Sucks

[grammar fascist]

but once you let the inmates run the asylum, the game is over.

Can't we get one story done without drifting towards discussing politics?

Or perpetrating mixed metaphors?

Nah. I've got an even better one:

But once you let the inmates run the asylum, the game is over: you've bought the farm and now you'll sleep in it.

Re:Digg Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

But once you let the inmates run the asylum, the game is over: you've bought the farm and now you'll sleep in it... and when you're sleeping with the dogs, you wake up with the fleas.

Re:Digg Sucks

[Geminii]

America parent up!

2 questions

[aadvancedGIR]

1- is TFA actualy shorter than the "short" post?
2- is this an attempt to boost ad revenues by being /.ed?

Ballot box stuffing is easy on /. too

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I've voted for the TARDIS 8 or 9 times already from the same logged-in account. Then again, I'm from Chicago.

Re:Ballot box stuffing is easy on /. too

[sconeu]

Mod parent up.

About 10 years ago, I bought my mother a t-shirt to wear when voting. It said, "I'm from Chicago... TWO BALLOTS PLEASE".

She thought it was hysterical.

Re:Ballot box stuffing is easy on /. too

[TodMinuit]

That's two ballots, which come pre-voted for Democrats, and each ballot will be ran twice.

That's how it's done over by 'dare.

Re:Ballot box stuffing is easy on /. too

[Rob T Firefly]

That's nothing.. I'm using my TARDIS to find the parents of those who voted differently than I, track down young versions of them in the past, and interfere with their ever meeting each other, thus ensuring that they will never produce children who would eventually grow up to vote on Slashdot polls.

Re:Ballot box stuffing is easy on /. too

[nuzak]

But it's okay because the state GOP throws out Democrat ballots anyway.

(it's a joke son, laugh)

Re:Ballot box stuffing is easy on /. too

[TodMinuit]

Clearly you're not from Chicago and think I'm playing party politics.

Re:Ballot box stuffing is easy on /. too

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Two Democratic precint captains are going through the cemetary, writing down names.
(Most non-Chicagoans laugh here, but that's not the joke.)
They come to one tombstone that's weathered and worn, so one of them stoops to rub it off.
"Come on", the other one says, "there's plenty more here".
"No", the first one says, "This guys got just as much a right to vote as everyone else".

Re:Ballot box stuffing is easy on /. too

[nuzak]

I don't get it. Maybe because the punchline was in the first line of the setup?

terrible idea

[illegalcortex]

I'm sad that someone spent this much time describing a system that seems like it would be a total failure. I think a system like this used on digg would actually give the users LESS influence in voting. Why? Because most users read digg from the standpoint of the most popular stories. They aren't interested in reading the dreck that hasn't been voted up yet. And believe me, there's a LOT of dreck. I certainly wouldn't waste time checking out the stories in the random box. The front page is random enough for me already. Something gets enough votes to be on the front page and then I check it out and digg it if it's good. But frequently crappy stuff will slide right off the front page if it's not really that good.

The problem is that the submitter is trying to translate a method that "diggs" a photo into a method that diggs a story. Story take much more time to read than photos. It simply doesn't work the same.

Re:terrible idea

[sarathmenon]

Better still, use this version of digg The news is a bit older, but all the crap is filtered out. Atleast most if it. The irritating beryl videos and photoship tips still make it to the top, which make me wonder about the quality of the digg crowd.

Re:terrible idea

[illegalcortex]

Actually, that's frequently what I do. It's when I run out of stuff to read that I go to the Newly Popular page. That's why I view the Newly Popular page as being as close to this proposed "random links" page as you can get and still have people actually want to read the stories.

One of the things I like about digg over slashdot is that I quickly run out of stuff to read on slashdot. If I had less free time while at the computer, it wouldn't be an issue.

Re:terrible idea

[bennetthaselton]

The idea is that even if most people ignore the stories in the random box, as long as some people do read them, the system still works. If only 25% of people vote on the stories in the random box, and it takes 100 people (probably a lot less, by the way) to get a statistically significant sample, then you just have to show it to 400 people instead of 100.

The "shutout voting" idea discussed in the article, is so that really obvious spam would get voted off after only, say, 10 votes had been collected, and eventually spammers wouldn't find it worth their while (if they had to submit a Turing test every time they submitted a post, they only get 10 eyeballs each time they do that, and it's not worth it).

Used to be high on digg

[Minter92]

I was really big on digg back in it's early days. It started as a small community of web devs and techy people. The early digg was dominated by good tutorial, cheap deals, and other stories of interest to web devs. Sadly it quickly went down hill once it became popular. It got overun with myspace kids and weird political conspiracy theorists. By about Sept 2005 Digg was dead. All my friends had left and there are only soo many videos of some dude getting hit in the groin, and so many "Bush is a moron who happens to be an evil genius" that intelligent people can take. Digg is the wasteland of the internet a collection of myspace level users posting stupid content. Intelligent users fled digg over a year ago.

Re:Used to be high on digg

[theantipop]

Reddit is quicky following this trend. It can turn an interesting picture link every once in a while, but worthwhile news or tech articles are quickly burried by political spam and stupidly redundant discussion. I joined late in the game and have found it isn't worth the time to try and get my story preferences set to make the site worthwhile.

Re:Used to be high on digg

[Guanine]

Intelligent users fled digg over a year ago.

THIS IS SO TRUE. Here's the thing: both Digg and YouTube comments make your eyes bleed and force you to reconsider all that is wrong with humanity ... but the Digg comments are aggressively bad. What I mean is, YouTube comments are short bursts of utter stupidity, whereas Digg comments can stretch into these long diatribes of the most ignorant/misinformed/poorly written garbage I've ever seen.

Re:Used to be high on digg

[coaxial]

The early digg was dominated by good tutorial, cheap deals, and other stories of interest to web devs. Sadly it quickly went down hill once it became popular.

No. It sucked even then. It was dominated by 'k3w1 CSS TuT0ri4l d00dz!!!!!!!eleventy-one!!!!" Then the link would be something along the lines of "Hey! Check dis out! You can change the color of a font by using the kolor tag! Its like thi5 "colr: greene" Wow! Diggs me ups! w00t!" Complete with typos.

Digg always seemed to have a mean user age of 15.

Quick way to do it

[LiquidCoooled]

Make all digg articles as long as this.
That way its simply a case of attrition to see if people can scroll far enough to "digg it".
chances are they will lose interest when something shiney in the sidebar [AMAZING!!!!! PICTURES!!!!!] catches their eye.

Digg is lame anyway.

[bcrowell]

Digg is pathetic. The concept is democracy gone crazy, like those idiotic TV shows where the audience votes for who's the best performer. Whatever slashdot's shortcomings in other areas, at least they have paid editors who work at it like a real job. Reading the typical comments on digg, they all seem to be by high school students who think they know the secret to tabletop nuclear fusion, and they're all voting each other's posts up and down like crazy, based on nothing but their own biases. At least with slashdot moderation, posts are likely to be moderated by randomly chosen people who didn't get handed a license to go around voting their friends up and their enemies down.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[Red Flayer]

The concept is democracy gone crazy, like those idiotic TV shows where the audience votes for who's the best performer.

Democracy gone crazy? Democracy is crazy. The tyranny of the majority, etc., coupled with systemic misinformation?

There's a reason that democracy in its pure form doesn't exist anywhere in the political world -- it's a flawed system. If the goal is good discourse, then any site should realize this and not allow a purely democratic system.

However, my guess is that the owners of Digg aren't interested in maximizing the quality of comments on the site. They are interested in maximizing revenues from the site -- and the number of hits they get suggest that they are doing something right. It may be in the best interest of the user to have an "ungamed" Digg -- but I don't see it affecting the bottom line there, since they already have so little credibility.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Brad, I modded you interesting but now you owe me.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[jellomizer]

Digg use to be pritty good. Then it really got bad.

Now when ever I check Digg. I normally get the following topic.
Look at the Cool Picture [cool, beautiful...]
The Bush Administration is Evil because...
Atheist are more moral people then anyone else.
Religious people suck because...

The Digg Systems of Moderation of comments is far worse then slashdots. At least in Slashdot most opposing viewpoints and not normally moderated down to base levels and usually spur debate. Digg if you defend Religion, the Bush Administration... You are quite quickly buried, and with little debate on the topic.

Before it was so popular Digg actually had some good and more intelligent stuff but not because it go so popular it is more average joe interest story.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[R0]

That's not fair - people are paid to frontpage articles on digg too!

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[solios]

Democracy gone wrong, or proof of the failings/flaws of a democracy? Apply Sturgeon's Law to a "majority rules" system and you're going to wind up with The All Dancing All Singing Crap Review - the Tyranny Of The Majority, etc.

I try to ignore Digg, and I try to avoid sites that opt into the Digg circlejerk - I have yet to find that little "digg it!" icon attached to anything of merit. :P

Of course, I'm not an eighteen year old hipster doofus trying to get laid through teh intarwebz. Which puts me way, way out of Digg's demographic.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[kabocox]

Digg is pathetic. The concept is democracy gone crazy, like those idiotic TV shows where the audience votes for who's the best performer. Whatever slashdot's shortcomings in other areas, at least they have paid editors who work at it like a real job. Reading the typical comments on digg, they all seem to be by high school students who think they know the secret to tabletop nuclear fusion, and they're all voting each other's posts up and down like crazy, based on nothing but their own biases. At least with slashdot moderation, posts are likely to be moderated by randomly chosen people who didn't get handed a license to go around voting their friends up and their enemies down.

This is the funnies thing that I've ever read. Just trade in slashdot for where you have digg and the same applies except we are more of a randomly chosen jury duty around here rather than anything like democracy. Actually, both forums could be discribed as angry mobs if you try to voice opinions against the majority. On slashdot, just come out in favor of closed source, Microsoft, DRM, copyrights, censorship, ID, or the police or the government (doesn't matter which police or which government) to get modded down. Group think is alive and well in both forums.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[trifish]

Slashdot is actually more pathetic. The only thing you need to say to get modded as Troll is to mention a thing in which a BSD license is better than GPL. It's your opinion and you are entitled to it. However, you will be modded as Troll everytime. How's that a good working system? It's rather ridiculous.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[level99]

You're forgetting the endless stream of topics about Google, Apple or something Steve Jobs might have said/seen/thought anywhere from 2 days to 40 years ago. Shame on you. ;-)

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[sponga]

It has its highs and lows.

For awhile it was chaos, than the spammers showed up, than the guys advertising their blogs than the Ubuntu zealots showed up; it got bad when the page was almost filled with Ubuntu articles they knew they had to do something which is why we don't get spammed by every new taste of Linux also. There was a time when it was first released we would get great articles from places like hackaday.com and other cool DIY stuff.

I still enjoy the site because I can quickly glimpse over a retarded article that obviously has no interest to me; I think of it like the spam I get in the email and how quickly I can look past it to go on with my life.

Here are some of the articles up there now and actually are pretty good stuff; I mean they got the Google love that used to go on around here, IT stuff, censorship and other nerd stuff.

Digg CommentSpy
Top 5 Creepiest Robot Clones
Fatsecret: A Site for Fat People
New York Times Confirms Google Phone
10 Unexpected Uses of the iPod
MySpace China, a place for censorship
Top 100 Most Influential People in IT
An interesting way to explore DIGG by walking through the site-Visually
Powering 4000 Homes: One Wind Turbine (PHOTOS)
Dodge Challenger preproduction body shells caught on camera [PICS]
The RIAA's worst nightmare: computers that understand music
12 Ways to Be A Security Idiot - A Slideshow.
150 Photos of Various Spiral Shapes (ooh pretty)
PyDigg - A Python Toolkit for the Digg API
The Travails of Tracking Web Traffic

Kind of get sick of Slashdot and having to hear how awful the U.S. is today, how many of my rights are being stripped away and how the socialist over in Europe have it so much better than America.
DIGG is agenda free majority of the time when selecting its articles which I enjoy, but also like to hear the deeper discussion with /. on the issue.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of get sick of Slashdot and having to hear how awful the U.S. is today ...

DIGG is agenda free majority of the time What Digg are you going to? Must not be the same one I go to where anything that disagrees with certain PoVs is buried faster than greased lightning.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of get sick of Slashdot and having to hear how awful the U.S. is today, how many of my rights are being stripped away and how the socialist over in Europe have it so much better than America.

Typical yank. Gets sick of the truth, instead of acting upon it. You know, maybe there's truth in it. Yes that's right, what a crazy idea, maybe, just maybe, the USA are not the best place in the world. Maybe your rights ARE being snatched away one by one.
But hey, you get sick of hearing that, so never mind my crazy talk. You say what? You still have the constitution? Hahaha, they use it as toilet paper in Washington last time I checked. Come on, be serious, I don't have to go in detail here, you already know they do. But that's not the worst thing. The worst thing is you don't even realize you already lost your precious freedom anyway. That's right, you sacred freedom has already been stripped away from you. Even if your constitution was worth something still, you couldn't do anything with it, because you don't WANT to. They made you believe you're free and they made you believe you're an enemy of the state if you use that freedom. They brainwashed you without you ever knowing. And now, you dance your monkey-freedom-dance, in the little case they build for you, you're free in that case, they say you can open the little door, you just haven't tried, because that's unpatriotic.

Well anyway, nothing to worry about, go on and grab some nachos, and check if there's some wrestling on the tele!

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can get a comment defending the Bush Administration modded up on Slashdot I will fucking suck your dick.

But seriously, that's not much different from Slashdot. Every political article eventually degrades into "The Bush Administration is Evil because..." and every religious article eventually degrades into "Atheist are more moral people then anyone else" and "Religious people suck because...". The difference is that on Digg it's the article that instigates it whereas on Slashdot it's the comments that instigate it. The comments that go against the Slashdot grain and get modded up are few and far between.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[jfengel]

I looked at some of your recent posts. You do seem to get modded down a lot for no particular reason. Have you done something to piss somebody off?

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[tfinniga]

Digg has spent most of its time creating a system for users to moderate links.
Slashdot has spent most of its time creating a system for users to moderate discussions.

For links I go to Digg.
For discussions I go to Slashdot.

Typically, I use the '10 hot comments' sidebar thing to read slashdot. That's how I found your comment.. :)

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[trifish]

I looked at some of your recent posts. You do seem to get modded down a lot for no particular reason.

Thanks for your words. Now when I think about it, it is indeed possible that someone I've "beaten" in a discussion might be listing my posts whenever he's got any mod points and mods me down. It is certainly possible.

I am going to send a complaint the abuse dept of Slashdot. They do investigate such things.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[trifish]

Bingo -- you were right. I've just received a reply from Bob from the Slashdot staff (who I had emailed directly). He investigated the negative moderator actions on my posts in the past months and found out that it was a single person doing it.

Bob wrote that he "stripped him of his Slashdot rights".

Hopefully, meta-moderators will take care of these "moderators" in the future. Thanks for your eye-opening advice.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[jfengel]

It's disappointing to hear that meta-moderating didn't catch that. I like to meta-moderate when I'm bored just because it lets me see a few random comments that somebody thought were interesting, but I'd always sorta hoped that some algorithm somewhere was noticing when somebody was judged unfair a lot.

Glad to hear that the jerk is off your case.

I'm curious: did they say who it was? I wonder if it was "Dr. Manhattan", who has declared himself your foe. (He shows up on your freaks page.) I'd love to think that a Slashdotter is too clever to actually announce himself before a vendetta, but hey, it takes all kinds.

Re:Digg is lame anyway.

[Magius_AR]

Now when ever I check Digg. I normally get the following topic.
Look at the Cool Picture [cool, beautiful...]
The Bush Administration is Evil because...
Atheist are more moral people then anyone else.
Religious people suck because...

More accurately:
GREATEST PICTURE EVAR!!!
BREAKING!!!: Bush Administration is the MOST EVIL EVER because!!!!!!!!!
Atheeist r more morale than everyone! BUSH SUCKS OMGOMG!!!!
Why Atheists ROX0R!!!

Further capitalization and mispellings, additional exclamation points, and/or any other hyperbolic, retarded communication styles are optional of course.

Oops

[jlebrech]

Wrong topic (multiple tabs)

Digg me down

Not quite

[Red Flayer]

(Or, only sign up with manipulation services which publish a privacy policy promising never to share your information, especially not with sites like Digg. Then if Digg buys them out, then the site has violated their privacy policy and Digg as the new owner inherits the liability for that, so you can sue them, right?)

That's a nice piece of logic to prevent your information from being shared, but I don't think it would work that way. If Digg bought out that service, then Digg becomes the new owner at the same moment that it becomes privy to the information; and a company cannot be held liable for sharing information with itself in the absence of a no-data-retention agreement. Even so, how many companies out there do not have a we-reserve-the-right-to-change-this-agreement-with out-warning clause attached to their privacy policies?

MOD PARENT UP

[Icarus1919]

Parent is right, there is NO way to abuse the moderation system.

Both RNC and DNC have expressed interest

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

In a late breaking news both the Republican and Democratic parties have expressed their support for the "gameable" version where votes could be manipulated by injecting money into the equation. In a joint statement, they said, "As long as we can use money to manipulate vote, any vote, we are in favor of it. Though we appear to be bickering and fighting a lot, we do coopeate to make sure our duopoly survives and endures. Unlike diggit, we can outlaw any attempt to fix the gaming of the system."

The problem is the users not the submitters

[bigbigbison]

The number one problem isn't really the submitters but the users. I can't tell you how often I go to one of the stories that was dugg up (particularly in the videogame section) and it is only someone quoting from another website. Then you go look in the submitter's history and all the stories that person has submitter are just stories they have reposted on their crappy blog.

Now I hate the people that only submit their own crappy websites, but the fact is that if people take a second to look and realize that this "story" is only a cut and paste from another site and not digg it then those crappy spammers would go away.

If people stop digging crappy websites that steal content from other sites then the quality of digg would go up.

Meh, You call yourself a Chicagoian?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

If you were a true Chicagoian like me, you would have voted 20 times from a dead account, while giving free slashvertisements for those who contributed to the Tardis Re-election committee.

Re:Meh, You call yourself a Chicagoian?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Whoops, forgot something:

Eat at fishey Joes

Ride the Walrus!

Better still ...

[DaveCar]

... it gets on to the front page two or three times!

Mod this guy FUNNY

[MillionthMonkey]

I almost didn't get that.

Firehose leak fixed

[mdsolar]

I sent in a bug report a while back that I could vote for my own submission on the firehose. This appears to have been fixed in a strange way:
In my most recent submission (yesterday on fascism, digg it ;-) the submission turned up in the firehose as already voted. Don't know if it was voted up or down though.
--
Vote with your roof: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:Firehose leak fixed

[Mr Z]

Presumably, the act of submitting an article is a tacit vote for the article. Then again, mental illness seems slightly over represented in the Slashdot community at times...

--Joe

In communist Russia, the stories bury you

[Marcion]

Sorry that is the best I could do, the doing favours for cmdrtaco jokes have been done already.

But seriously, I prefer not having to digg stories, meta-moderating once a week or two is about as much time as I can spend on this at the moment. So hopefully Slashdot will not go too far down the American Idol route, I just want some Linux news and some bad jokes from the users.

Re:In communist Russia, the stories bury you

[The Great Pretender]

A penguin, a rippling window and a Golden Delicious walked into a bar...

Re:In communist Russia, the stories bury you

[bulliver]

Bartender says, "What is this, some kinda joke?"

Unintended Consequences: Rebiased voting

[redelm]

Certainly it is possible to ignore/underweight deeplink hits. But then you are effectively prioritizing the FP surfers. Until the 'bot algorithm gets changed.

Fundamentally, 'bots must be fought by tasks they cannot accomplish, like confused OCR or fuzzy logic.

Absolute user ratings are broken by design

[El_Muerte_TDS]

It will always turn out into a popularity contest. Votes can always be bought.
Some people will always try to abuse a system.
There is only one solution for this and that's using a web of trust with weighted ratig. People you trust have a higher rating and the people that the people you trust trust (friend of friends), etc.
The result ofcourse would be a different rating for articles for every user.
Yes, it is like the friend/foe system for comments on /.

Re:Absolute user ratings are broken by design

[Opportunist]

It can work. It can lead to nepotism.

The best case scenario is what you describe: People get trusted by their peers, their votes are considered more valuable, they in turn tag others as friends, hopefully based on them being sane people.

The worst case would be that some loonies end up on that 'trusted' list. Maybe deliberately so. That "game" has been played other places before that implement a 'friend/foe' system: Be sane, considerate, give helpful or insightful comments, get on the good side of people, get "excellent karma" (or whatever it's called), wait 'til your word has some meaning, then invite friends (and LOTS of them), i.e. make 'bots' and go berserk on the voting system.

Re:Absolute user ratings are broken by design

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true. And here at UC Davis we have done the scientific research to prove it.

Re:Absolute user ratings are broken by design

[jZnat]

I don't really think the Slashdot Zoo is a good example of a web of trust. I have plenty of people here who are both a "friend of friend" and a "foe of friend" at the same time. I believe the zoo is more so for keeping track of whose comments you like to read or respond to than who is most likely to make an accurate or well thought out comment. They can be the same of course, but not often.

Digg is already heavily biased ...

[balzak]

Digg is already heavily biased and I'm pretty sure it's because of astroturfing by political campaigns (Ron Paul, Obama) and ultra-liberal blogs. If you look at the Political section of digg (something that I filter out now), you notice that it's about 99% moon-bat liberal (except for Ron Paul). I believe that studies have been conducted that indicate that liberals tend to spend more time on the internet than conservatives (and conservatives do talk radio more than liberals), but that can't possibly account for this level of bias. Thinkprogress, dailykos, crooksandliars are all *heavily* partisan and continually have stories on digg, and the comments sections for those stories will always shout down (bury) any dissenting view. After reading digg/Politics for months, I highly suspect that this effect is caused by an organized effort.

Re:Digg is already heavily biased ...

[hyperstation]

if by "dissenting view" you mean "asinine right-wing claptrap", then you're right. it's not like there's some rule on the internet that every opinion must be given equal time.

if it's 'moon-bats' you're looking for, maybe freerepublic would be more your speed...

Re:Digg is already heavily biased ...

[CupBeEmpty]

The problem is that this goes beyond partisan politics. I agree that digg seems to skew left rather than right but that is not really the point is it?

The point is that the very ability to "bury spam" is inherently abusable. It is a simple tyranny of the majority. When the punishment for only being 49% popular is complete disappearance with no recourse you end up censoring otherwise popular content. There is no button for "this is not spam" or "this is not lame" in digg. Say something that is mildly unpopular and it can easily be buried.

The problem is that the "bury" criteria are opaque. It is possible (even likely) that a small group is able to bury stories according to their personal agenda which is anathema to a site like digg. I consider this to be as much a problem as spamming stories to the front page. As is the system digg uses is self defeating... it assumes all users opinions are worthwhile whereas slashdot makes you work for your opinion to really means something. There is an "activation energy" to influence stories and comments.

Re:Digg is already heavily biased ...

[Geminii]

When the punishment for only being 49% popular is complete disappearance with no recourse ...then Diebold would like to discuss a mutally profitable arrangement :)

A fence built on troubled borders

[rhoder]

My humans will thwart your thing, Build a wall, build three, My diggers and climbers won, Before you've begun.

Ding?

[stonecypher]

So, what you're saying, Bennett, is that you don't know what vaporware is? (It's like one of those episodes of Star Trek that's plodding along happily, then someone says they have to download their sensor readings to the ship, and then you just have to go kill an innocent child.)

Re:Ding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because we all have to kill innocent children when tiny, ignorable mistakes are made, especially mistakes dealing with language where the meaning is still there. Seriously, the meaning of what you're saying isn't the essence of language, it's the rules.

MOD PARENT DOWN!!!

[EL_mal0]

I vehemently disagree with your post.

If only I had mod points. . .

First post!

[loafing_oaf]

All I had to do was pay about 50,000 of my closest friends. This post will be number one in a few short hours.

Unfair comparisons

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

I know there are those that compare Slashdot and Digg and they couldn't be more apples and oranges. I come to Slashdot when I would like some intellectual insight and I go to Fark when I want something funny.

I go to Digg when I want OMG!!!! L33T Fanboi yatayata...
Digg is, in short, a wasteland. The submissions are great but if one wrote the book on it, "Pooh foraging for honey" would read like Tolstoy.

+1 irony

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the way your post came with two references to your own crappy blog.

DIGG - dead to me

[Stavr0]

If a DIGG's popularity is set with bought-and-paid-for schemes and/or astroturfed, then it has zero value to me as an aggregator. If they don't fix the problem, more an more people will realize this and it will die.

game the system just like Rose did

[Anonymous Coward]

It's karma, baby. Digg gets what it deserves. Has anyone seen this little tidbit? Evidently, when Kevin Rose hosted a TV show on TechTV/G4TV, he promoted Digg without revealing he was the owner of the site. See him in action.

Sure, why not expand the game area?

[Opportunist]

I mean, money is already injected into the parties to influence the laws they make, why not continue the cycle and hand that money down to the voters?

Great Idea....

[darthflo]

...but I don't think digg would like to adapt it very much:

Assuming they implemented the system as described, forcing users only to vote for random stories, who would be interested in putting those annoying "Digg This!1ZOMG" buttons on their Site anymore? They wouldn't get any diggs for it, so I guess nobody. (Well maybe IBM, so they keep their newfound digg/reddit/whatever coolness).
Now if nobody put those buttons on their site, nobody would care about digg anymore. They'd be left with no more "whored" PR (as in PageRank), search engine result pages would be free of diggspam and everybody would be happy. Except for those diggers. The ones who decide if or not the system gets implemented.

Really?

[DocJohn]

The difference is that on HotOrNot, it doesn't work. On HotOrNot, you can cast votes for a picture in one of two ways. The first way is to go directly to the URL for someone's picture; the second way is to load the front page, where a random picture from the database is selected at random, and vote for whatever picture comes up. The catch is that the votes that you cast by going directly to someone's picture, are simply ignored in calculating the average score for that photo.

Really? Nowhere in the HotOrNot FAQ ( http://www.hotornot.com/pages/faq.html ) does it mention that only certain votes are counted. In fact, the FAQ addresses a question about friends clicking on your photo:

10. I know my friends have voted on my picture already, but I don't see any votes when I log in to check my score! What's going on?

Votes are not tabulated instantly, they are counted every hour or so. Check your picture rating again later.

Randomization wouldn't work on digg, because I'd say about 90% of the submissions are spam/junk or repeats. If you make me wade through that 90% randomly in order for me to vote on something I think is interesting, I'm going to stop voting altogether. Me and hundreds of thousands of others, I suspect.

Popularity != Good

[jhouserizer]

What's the big deal? Digg doesn't measure a stories "goodness". It only measures it's popularity. If a user can use their resources to increase a story's popularity, isn't that just proving its popularity?

Re:Popularity != Good

[TubeSteak]

If a user can use their resources to increase a story's popularity, isn't that just proving its popularity?

If a Presidential Candidate can use their resources to increase their vote count, isn't that just proving their popularity?

Sure, within reason.

Vote buying (which is Digg's problem) OTOH...
All it proves is that you induced people to vote.
It does not prove that they liked your submission or that it is popular.

Influencing people = good
Buying votes = bad
You see the difference?

Re:Popularity != Good

[JackSpratts]

If a user can use their resources to increase a story's popularity, isn't that just proving its popularity?

no, it just proves it's a commercial. - js.

Re:Popularity != Good

[jhouserizer]

That's fair enough, but my badly made point was that anything that simply measures popularity isn't worth a lot - or rather shouldn't be worth a lot. Of course popularity is all that adversers (and presidential candidates) care about... Us "consumers" of news and "voters" of politicians should care about everything *except* popularity. Popular opinions are very regularly anything but thoughtful. So, bringing my point around, I don't care what's popular on Digg. The only thing Digg is to me is somewhere to occasionally pop over to to find an amuzing article or two to pass my time with. In fact, I visit Digg less every month. It's not a resource for stuff that matters to me. It's a resource for meta culture. Hence, I don't really care if the voting on Digg is biased.

digg is missing out

[neersign]

they should realize that this is a new way to make money, change their business model, and capitalize on it. They should take money from people in exchange for digg points on their story. If digg is going to turn in to what is basically all advert stories anyway, they might as well be the ones making the money, not some other parasitic "company".

Too big of a change

[Kopretinka]

This probably wouldn't work as a change to Digg or reddit because it changes the whole idea. Currently, I rank on digg after I've seen a story from selected category and/or popularity, selected by headline. So I rate after I've (partially) used the ratings of the other users, whereas with the presented idea, either I rate random stories or I see (but cannot rate) highly-ranking stories. Different principle, really.

Actually it's likely more what they do on the net.

[kinglink]

I'm willing to bet that conservatives and liberals use the internet and have the same amount of talk shows with a slight bias the way you're talking about. One thing I notice is conservatives don't give out their information that easily and tend not to just take surveys and such which will skew the data. On the other hand, liberals are willing to have talk shows that aren't just "liberal talk shows" they'll make it about a liberal topic or hide it as a variety of talk shows.

I've found myself hating "nonpartisan" sites for exactly the same reason you mention, as you bring up Thinkprogress, and others. Thinkprogress is one of those sites that claims to be a non partisan site but obviously has an agenda (hell a quick look at the front page makes it blazingly obvious which side of that fence they are on). Yet somehow they get away with calling themselves non-partisan and people believe them.

One site I frequent is ornery.org. A reprinting of newspaper articles from Orson Scott Card, who claims to be a democrat but seems to agree with the republicans more than the democrats currently. However a quick look at his forum just shows that there's obviously a larger portion of liberal thinking available that seems to troll his board to the point of it essentially becoming a liberal hangout (go figure, because most of his ideas seem to be the opposite).

I don't know if I can really call all of this an "organized" effort, but it's certainly a gathering of like minded individuals doing what they can for "the cause".

StumbleUpon beat you to it.

[Siker]

There's actually a website that does exactly this already. It's called StumbleUpon. You click a button and you're brought to a random page according to one of your many subscribed interests. If you like it, you say so, if you don't you vote it down. Bad pages don't get any up votes, or may even get down votes, and so they are quickly weeded out. Nice pages get some number of up votes and then subsequently get shown to more people who in turn might give them more up votes and so on.

Re:StumbleUpon beat you to it.

[radtea]

The StumbleUpon signup process says "Join and Download". Apparently you can't get an account without letting them install some random stuff on your computer. No thank you.

If it is possible to join without them downloading some random, undescribed, undocumented software, I'd be interested. But I have zero interest in a site that simply wants me to trust them that whatever they are downloading is no big deal (probably a toolbar, which is mostly harmless but which I certainly don't want).

Re:StumbleUpon beat you to it.

[Anonymous Coward]

...and you can't cheat by buying ranking, because that's not cheating. StumbleUpon sells preferred placement as part of its revenue model.

Re:StumbleUpon beat you to it.

[Quay42]

I've been using StumbleUpon for about a year now and it's one of the more addicting things you can do. I understand your paranoia but I can vouch (though, who vouches for *me*) that it's not adware or anything. It *is* a toolbar (it used to just be a single button 'Stumble' with a thumbs up and thumbs down but it's bigger now). It's the only toolbar I'll allow on my system... so there you go.

If you're still paranoid, just Google around... it has quite a community and I can say with fair certainty you won't find anybody with complaints about the toolbar itself. But it's mostly just for entertainment, so there's no real reason for you to install it anyhow.

I'd say about 40% of my current RSS feeds come from stuff I found on StumbleUpon.

Just my .2c

Re:StumbleUpon beat you to it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. As a big fan of collaborative filtering I find the idea interesting. However, since it could be done using a simple frameset I am personally suspicious of the need for a client-side app install, toolbar or otherwise.

Re:StumbleUpon beat you to it.

[orielbean]

It is also a firefox plugin. Does require the plugin install and you need to create a login, but the plugin is safechecked by firefox for malware. Or are you worried about something else?

Re:StumbleUpon beat you to it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The best thing about Stumbleupon is that the focus is on the content, not the posting user, karma, or comments. You can browse content directly, which combined with preferences and categories, means you ignore most of the problems of Digg. In a way, Digg might be better if it didn't have a frontpage, which only attracts idiots (also, unlimited voting is stupid).

Summary

[Z0mb1eman]

Summary of the article:

"I have devised a marvellous way to stop Digg-cheating, which this article summary is too short to contain."

(aka: if it's so simple, why does it take 19361 more bytes to explain it?)

Just don't show the votes

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't digg just get rid of the "who dugg it" page? If there's no way for vote-buyers to verify how their customers really decided to vote, then they're ruined.

But digg is popular because...

[Anonymous Coward]

...they don't take advices from Slashdot's controlfreaks.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=digg%2Cslashdot

User/Submitter Experiment in Wired

[harryhair5]

Here's a direct link to one of the user/submitter experiments Annalee Newitz mentions in her article: http://www.schechtertech.com/weblog/PermaLink,guid ,869c9bf1-c0fd-4bb0-8d78-16085ece041f.aspx.

It was performed by Harry Schechter for a USB temperature sensor product: http://www.temperaturealert.com/ .

Mod parent up.

[jojoba_oil]

Sure, he's an AC. But he has a point.

Everything I've read from BH has been excessively verbose and almost crusadic in self-righteousness. Granted the systems he's "exposing" (OMG! __insert any major dynamic content site__ can be abused?!? NO WAY!) are flawed but that doesn't mean that his half-baked "solutions" are any better. Just because Google can be google-bombed doesn't mean that Bennett's search algorithm is the end-all for search. (Yeah, he hasn't "exposed" Google yet but I have a feeling he would if there was enough negative-google going around. As such I use it as an example.)

Heck, I noticed this over a year ago

[vrmlguy]

I was complaining about the stupidification of Digg in January of last year: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174429&cid=145 43675

Re:Actually it's likely more what they do on the n

[Nasarius]

Thinkprogress is one of those sites that claims to be a non partisan site but obviously has an agenda (hell a quick look at the front page makes it blazingly obvious which side of that fence they are on). Yet somehow they get away with calling themselves non-partisan and people believe them.

There's no contradiction here. Look at their about page:

The Center for American Progress Action Fund is a nonpartisan organization. With the blog, CAPAF seeks to provide a forum that advances progressive ideas and policies.

They're perfectly open about their biases. Nonpartisan has a very specific meaning: not affiliated with any party. It is *not* a synonym for unbiased. DailyKos is partisan; their explicit mission is to promote Democratic candidates. It's sort of an anomaly in that way. Most liberal blogs (I will always hate that word) aren't partisan.

I dont dig Digg no more

[Orig_Club_Soda]

At first Digg seemed like a great site. But The last 6 months or so it's become useless in regards to ranking. The site has obvious political leanings, and the users digg emotionally, not rationally. Every article on the front page is artificially manipulated in its presence on the home page.

The Digg social experiment proves that you need mature and sensible editors to maintain quality, objectivity and worthiness.

Re:I dont dig Digg no more

[kz45]

"The Digg social experiment proves that you need mature and sensible editors to maintain quality, objectivity and worthiness"

I'm not sure if you know this or not..but the articles on digg are moderated. There are people that decide whether an article gets on the front page.

Reddit is a perfect example of how NOT to run a social bookmarking website (and I don't think they have any moderators at the top).

Mod parent FUNNY

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod douchebag parent funny and mod me as troll, you fucking bitches.

Well...

[EddyPearson]

Poof go those nice "Digg this site" buttons. That had to be the only time I ever dugg(?) anything. I think with a site the size of digg, that one loser in a million paying people to click, is just piss in the ocean.

Still broken: greasemonkey

[cbr2702]

His 'solution' doesn't work. To beat it you make a little browser script which highlights stories in the "random stories" box by checking them against ones people have agreed to buy clicks for.

Slash Dig

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, you fixed digg, but can you now stop Karma Whoring?

Digg is already on top of the situation

[artemis67]

Actually, the Digg team are pretty well on top of User/Submitter. When the story about it broke on Digg, I created a new Digg account and then signed up for U/S just to check it out. I dugg all of the stories I was told to digg (four in all, I think). Digg closed out my account within a few hours. I repeated the process several more times over about a week, and each time, Digg caught me and shut me down. I even tried creating accounts that posted messages that were well moderated, submitted stories, and dugg lots of other stories (basically, I acted like a valued user instead of a U/S whore), and I would even take hours between digging the U/S stories. Digg still found me and shut me down.

The answer is pretty simple. U/S is supposed to give you a lot of bogus links to click in addition to the paid links, just to throw Digg off their trail. But the bogus stories aren't randomly chosen for each person. As I clicked on each story I was told to digg, I would check the other accounts of people who had dugg it. And, sure enough, most everyone else was digging the exact same stories I was. Therefore, it was pretty simple for Digg to sign up with U/S, get the list of stories, search their own database for people who had dugg ALL of those stories, and close them out with absolute certainty.

So, what U/S needs to do is to 1) randomly choose bogus stories for each person and 2) don't give EVERYONE the link to the real story to digg. Digg would still find out which stories hit the front page because of U/S, but it would take Digg days or weeks instead of hours to track down the abusers and shut down the accounts.

Right now, U/S is too much of a hassle because you have to create a new Digg account every few hours.

Re:Digg is already on top of the situation

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention the last step after getting banned from Digg: submit your blog's stories on Slashdot (using a pseudoidentity) and jerk off happily when they get accepted. This is what Daniel Eran (Slashdot user DECS), author of RoughlyDrafted, did after trying to spam/game Digg with multiple accounts and getting caught. Since October, he's had seven accepted Slashdot stories, all of them pimping his shitty RoughlyDrafted blog. I find it depressing that some Slashdot readers actually like Daniel Eran's shitty articles on RoughlyDrafted.

• PROOF that Roughly Drafted is SPAMMING/Gaming Digg with multiple accounts
  Photographic evidence of AlexaW and RoughlyDrafted gaming Digg just to get moron Daniel Eran's articles to the front page. (Where they promptly get buried for being inaccurate.) Several users who ONLY digg AlexaW's submissions, all of whom signed up in the last 3 weeks. Coincidence? Not a chance. This needs to be stopped immediately.
• RoughlyDraftedBUSTED
• RDMBusted2
• Greenpeace response to Roughlydrafted

A quick 2 cents then

[Seiruu]

Nice idea, but not practical as it is IMO

2 assumptions first:

1. When it comes to articles, users prefer searching/browsing over having something randomly thrown into their laps to read. Odds of that happening are rather slim IMO.
2. Comparing "news" sites like digg to hotornot is not very fair because while digg has a "time - excitement" factor, hotornot does not. What I mean with that is: if you saw a pic that was submitted 3 months ago, the person in the pic is still the same hottie or not so hottie, that won't change. You're rating things that are essentially disconnected from what's happening in "real life". If you happen to stumble upon an article that goes on about Ubuntu's newest release 3, or God forbid, 4 weeks later, big odds are that you've read this somewhere else 3-4 weeks ago. No excitement, so why digg it up?

I can think of ways to soften the first issue, such as with recommender systems, so random is not entirely random, but with some pointed logic behind it. But, ironically, the better this system works, the closer we're to the voting issues again.

As for 2: don't know any "solutions" atm, if possible at all. I would personally never join a "news" site for the sake of voting where the only way I can vote is to randomly go through articles I never intended to read. it'd annoy me more. Might as well not vote and just read what I want, comment, and get the heck out.

So your idea works if people are somehow willing to receive random articles when they visit sites, and those articles aren't somehow bound by time.

Cluck like a CHICKEN

[LordEd]

Had to try, since mods seem to be taking requests right now.

Re:Cluck like a CHICKEN

[dotgain]

They can't cluck here or all their points in this thread will be reversed.

Re:Actually it's likely more what they do on the n

[kinglink]

So it's fine for a nonpartisan company to have a vague mission statement (Progressive ideas? Who decides what's progressive?) And then to completely rip into one party 90 percent of the time. Considering progressive has become almost a synonym for liberal, and liberalism is mainly one side of the aisle that to me sounds like less than non partisan. But we can't say that can we?

I demand a little more accountability. I'm not asking for "unbiased" but at the same time I am loathing the fact that groups claim "nonpartisan" when it's pretty blatant who they are cheering on. The ad council is a group I can get behind. They tip the scales a couple times (I think jumping into the global warming debate is a bad idea no matter what you do) but overall they tend to focus on issues of national importance. However for every group like the ad council there's at least 3 like Thinkprogress that hides behind a thin shade and pretends to be nonpartisan.

long article but...

[recharged95]

what makes digg-rigging different from any other service that uses popularity based ranking? (page rank comes to mind).

Interesting that ./ & wikipedia have at least a 1st line defense: moderated content...

This idea is fundamentally flawed...

[appleprophet]

The author of the article keeps referencing HotOrNot.com and how wonderful it is that people can't rate you from external sources. Well, Digg is very different from HotOrNot... Has the author not noticed that half the pages on the Internet have a fat DIGG THIS button on them? Even behemoths like YouTube and the New York Times have prominent links to Digg on virtually all of their content. Digg not only has no security against people voting on articles externally, it actively encourages it, which is the secret behind its exponential growth. As long as people can vote on articles from external sites, Digg will be susceptible to gaming, and it would be ridiculous for Digg to remove this feature and therefore remove literally billions of external links pointing to it.

Hmm... A few gamed stories every once in a while or billions of incoming links from some of the top sites on the internet? What a dilemma.

The Reddit "NSA sponsored" page

[synthespian]

Some of you early Reddit users might remember that Reddit had a page explaining that part of their funding came from an NSA (National Security Agency) research grant. Eventually, it was taken down. Remember?
Is Reddit part of of a larger NSA project to gather data on the Internet? Do you think? Is it fair that they don't inform that anymore?

Yeah, I know, I'm gonna be modded down by somebody who never saw the page.

Re:The Reddit "NSA sponsored" page

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really a reply to the above, but I'd like to point out that I surfed reddit to find a link to slashdot to view a story about digg. Am I missing any of the major user-submitted news sites?

Propaganda in America

[synthespian]

I mention this because today's story shows that sites like Reddit and Digg actually make life a lot easier for spin doctors and propaganda.

We all know there's quite a lot of propaganda in the U.S., such as the U.S. army funding Hollywood movies. (I think /. ran this story before. See here, here, and and here). Also, some people think prime time television is getting audiences to get used to the idea of torture. See here.

The point is that sites like Digg, Reddit and Wikipedia are maybe things that actually makes the a government's propaganda job easier, by making authority and authoritative opinion a more diffuse concept. There's no such concept as "reputation" or "editorial independence", like you have in the press.

IMHO, this is a twist on things. In particular, the younger generation that is growing up with such sites and with little or no concept of the traditional media outlets concern me the most. Newspaper sales are going down all over the world, for instance.

Re:Actually it's likely more what they do on the n

[architimmy]

Digg does tend to push some viewpoints to an extreme over others. Lately legalization of marijuana has really been one of the things that I've noticed most (pot cures cancer, etc...).

Also, it's exceedingly difficult to present any view in an unbiased fashion. After all I think most of us accept our viewpoint as centrist and every other viewpoint as skewing to some other extreme of that. Even people who might be as far to one side of a political spectrum as you can get view all other political viewpoints as biased. They just don't think anyone has a more extreme take on their own personal beliefs than they do. I think there is some merit to at least making an effort to present an unbiased, but editorialized, view on a particular topic. It just gets to a point where recognizing bias means you have to yourself become well educated on an issue. Unfortunately most people don't see the value in educating themselves about much of anything and would rather be fed a viewpoint. People like this tend to find being exposed to differing viewpoints to be highly distateful and hence they never realize the merit in differing beliefs or the bias in their own.

Lets assume however that you sit down 4 people who would label themselves republicans I don't doubt that all 4 would be the type who find any exposure to divergent beliefs to be offensive and uncomfortable. The political spectrum in this country has shifted so far right (perhaps because many far-left "liberals" are so unbearably smug and frankly, plain stupid) that many "liberal" values are really more centrist and hence should have a broader appeal. A good thing to look for in "unbiased" political commentary is whether the particular stance on an issue suggests a clear benefit to one group of people or another (end obvious). "Unbiased" political platforms tend to emphasize the good of society or civilization at their core. Another good indicator of "unbiased" political commentary is when it comes from someone who is generally regarded as an individual of high integrity. While they might have a right or left leaning viewpoint they tend to maintain their stance rather than flapping in the wind so to speak.

My personal bias is that preserving the environment, practicing sound fiscal policies, setting low tax rates that have an equal benefit for all social classes, and comprehensive social benefits (non-monetized healthcare, affordable college education, and robust civil liberties) are all policies which benefit the country as the whole because they are forward looking and hint at a responsibility towards the future of our country. And in that sense I think I have a fairly "unbiased" view of politics that simply doesn't permit me to even stomach any of the "Main" presidential candidates on either party's ballot.

Dodgy maths

[Repton]

..then on that basis the story can either be buried or promoted to the top, where it would be seen by, say, 100,000 people. The elegance of this system is that bad content would only be seen by 100 people on average before it's buried, whereas good content would be seen by all the 100,000 people who view it on the front page, so the average user sees 1,000 pieces of good content for every 1 piece of crap.

Let's say the digg front page shows n good stories and m random unrated stories in the sidebar. If the overwhelming majority of unrated stories are crap then you get m crap for every n good. Simple. If the proportion of good stories amongst unrated is higher, you multiply the proportion by m and separate out the bits. But it's still not gonna be 1000:1 good:crap.

Basically, Hasselton has his numbers mixed up. Good content will (assuming the scheme works) be seen by 1000 times as many users as bad content. But there is so much bad content that users still see plenty of it -- it's just that they're all reading _different_ bad content.

Only when...

[alexandreracine]

...it is "Posted by CmdrTaco"

Re:The fscking "summary" was longer than the artic

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you realize that when I have mod points, I have to work *hard* to find something worth using them on. About 9 times out of 10 some of my points expire before I use them. At least one third of the time, all five of them expire before I use them. The funny thing is, whenever I show up here, I always happen to have them.

So actually, Internet gibberish authors like you make it easy; for one thing, anonymous post moderations don't get meta-moderated, so I can mod you whatever I want with no recourse on my karma. Second, it's a free excuse to actually do something useful with them.

I understand this is a dissonant concept for you, as you never get mod points and you're furious about it... so I don't think you'd understand someone "not" having an inclination to moderate, and thus why you turds actually make it easy. For me anyway, when I have mod points, I'm more than willing to silence your crap.

/offtopic

Block the voters...?

[MaguroNigiri]

You know... an even better way to get rid of that exploit of the service, is not to block the votes, but to block the voters. Add a Digg/Bury function to the users themselves. Have everybody start-out with a rank of 5, and if they are "Buried" due to a high number of people voting against them, then their rank goes down, and their weight goes down in the voting. And if they are dugg, then their weight goes up. That may sound like an exploitable system, too... but I can compare it to Wikipedia in that anybody can screw it up if they want, but the community in general has good morale and the system will even itself out over time.

Re:Block the voters...?

[montyzooooma]

That's a totally exploitable system - Digg is already run by an apparently highly organised bunch of blog-spammers and this would just give them more power. The only way to counteract the effect is for "normal" Digg users to band together and effectively form another bloc that would be open to abuse. Digg is broken.

Re:Block the voters...?

[rtb61]

Digg was designed broken, it was built to be a marketdroid trap. As an individual you have one vote (unless you cheat with multiple accounts) versus companies that can have thousands of votes (all their employees, unless of course they simply decide to cheat). It was set up so company PR messages and stories could get 'voted' to the front page and individuals message that went against the PR line could get 'voted' out of existence.

You want to fix Digg, then simply copy /., they got a solution via trial and error that worked relatively well, whoops, now that's what Digg was created to fight against, a forum where the individuals opinions actually did take precedence of the company line (most of the time), whether the PR company trolls were googlites or microtrolls. Digg is a forum designed to 'create' public opinion not respond to it.

And rightly so ...

[kitzilla]

> Digg if you defend Religion, the Bush Administration... You are quite quickly buried, and with little debate on the topic.

And this is a problem?

I used to Digg but now I Dot

[ThirdPrize]

I was a regular /. reader until a year or so ago when the sexy young Digg came along. I converted for a bit but eventually I returned home. Digg has several flaws.

1-No editors. It is supposed to be a feature but have you seen the quality of half the stories that make the front page. Say what you like about Zonk, etc but their stories are normally relevant/interesting.

2-The comment system. A comment with one level of reply. That doesn't work on just soooo many levels.

3-The quality of comment is no where near as interesting as here on /. I think not having AC has a lot to do with it.

4-When has democracy ever really worked? Lets face it, CmdrTaco is a benign dictator and I can live with that.