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Buried By The Brigade At Digg
Even if you just arrived from Mars and have never heard of Digg, that description of the service should make it obvious how easy it is to game the system, by rounding up groups of friends to vote on stories that you want to promote, or to bury stories that you want to kill. The former type of abuse (and it is abuse, under Digg's Terms of Use; search for "organized effort") is far more common, since people usually have more incentive (commercial or otherwise) to promote their own work than to bury someone else's. And in fact, Digg has announced that the next version of the service will remove the "bury" button, replacing it with a "Report" button for reporting bona fide cases of abuse, not just to bury boring stories.
The thinking seems to be that abusive "digging" to promote a story, is less harmful than abusive "burying", and this has the ring of plausibility — that a creative effort is better than a destructive one. After all, Alternet had previously highlighted several artificial right-wing "digg brigades" mentioned in their story (Diggs And Buries, theliberalheretic, etc.), but they didn't blow the lid off of the situation until their report on the Digg Patriots bury brigade, as if to say, "Now we've found something really scandalous!" Annalee Newitz cheekily reported on how she bought votes to boost a story to the front page of Digg, but probably would have felt guilty if she'd hired a service to bury someone else's story. And when a Digg user organized an effort to bury Ron Paul stories that he thought were "spamming" the system, Ron Paul supporters protested that they were merely organizing to vote up stories they agreed with — the clear implication being that this was more honorable than organizing to vote stories down.
But this, I think, is a fallacy. If a story's ranking is artificially inflated, then the extra eyeballs for that story have to come from somewhere, and they come from users paying less attention to the other stories that the phony up-and-comer pushed out of the way. Artificially bumping a story up is just as harmful as artificially burying a story, but the harm is distributed among many innocent victims, not just one. (By the same reasoning, in fact, you could argue that burying a story does no net harm to other users of the Digg site, because the harm done to one story is cancelled out by the benefit to all the other stories that rise in prominence when the victimized story is pushed out of the way. So by strict economic logic, recruiting friends to boost your own story at the expense of everyone else's, is actually more harmful than organizing a bury brigade!)
So I don't think that Digg's replacing the "bury" button with a "report" button will fix the problem. For one thing, obviously groups could abuse the "report" button in the same way — issuing calls to action to report a story for violating the TOU. Since a flurry of bona fide abuse reports is presumably what Digg uses to identify and remove truly abusive stories like MLM spam, how are they going to tell the difference between these cases and cases of abusive "reporting"? (My suggestion: See if there is a sudden change in the percentage of users who view a story and make an abuse report. For stories that are genuine TOU violations, the percentage of users who "report" it should remain steady; for stories that are victimized by a "report brigade," you'll see a sudden spike in viewers and in the percentage of those viewers who report the story for abuse. This might have worked for detecting and stopping the bury brigades as well, although we'll never know now.)
But more fundamentally, even if this change does stop the "bury/report brigades" from killing stories at will, that only fixes the most obvious symptom of the underlying problem, which is that the system can be gamed by recruiting your friends to vote either way. It won't stop "brigades" from artificially promoting shallow stories that agree with their opinions, which does the same net harm overall.
Indeed, the most long-term harm that the DiggPatriots Yahoo Group might have done is that their cheating was so egregious that it makes other examples of cheating look benign by comparison, and might prevent people from realizing that "benign cheating" is just as harmful. As detailed in the Alternet report, the DiggPatriots group talked openly about cycling through different Digg accounts and circumventing bans on their IP addresses. The welcome message to the Yahoo Group told new users that the group was operating "under the radar." The group leader, a woman with the handle "bettverboten," talked about how to prevent Digg from monitoring their actions. And of course the vast majority of posts were calls to bury stories. But what if all of that had been inverted? If the group had operated in the open, while still focusing on recruiting conservative members? If each user limited to themselves to only one Digg account like they were supposed to? And if they focused not on burying stories, but on digging stories that promoted their viewpoints? Just as bad. It just doesn't sound as bad.
I still think the only way to make Digg a true meritocracy, would be to use some version of an algorithm I outlined in an earlier article, inauspiciously titled "How to Stop Digg-cheating, Forever." The gist of it is that in addition to collecting votes from friends, stories should be shown to a random subset of users on the site (perhaps in a box that occasionally appears at the top of the screen when they're logged in), who are asked to vote it up or down. The votes of a random sampling of users would be more representative of how much value the story would have to the Digg community as a whole. Even if most users who are asked to vote on a "random story" simply ignore the request, all you need is to show the story to a large enough sample that you can measure the difference in responses to a truly good story vs. one that has been promoted by digg-cheaters. You don't necessarily have to run this procedure for every story, only the ones that are about to gain some benefit from a large number of diggs (such as being pushed to the front page), and you need to decide whether the story really deserves that big boost. The only way to game that system would be to organize a group of dedicated Digg users so enormous that they constituted a significant percentage of all users on the system — something pretty hard to do without getting caught.
Still, the only site that I know of, that uses a version of this "random sampling" algorithm is HotOrNot.com, which lets you recruit your friends to vote on the "hotness" of your picture on a scale of 1 to 10 (by sending them a link to that specific picture), but also shows a stream of random pictures to visitors, so that your picture can collect votes from strangers. If the votes from the users who visit your picture via the link are significantly different from the votes from users who see your picture via the random stream, then HotOrNot discounts the votes from users who view your page via the link. This prevents digg-style gaming from people who want all their friends to give them a 10. (Note that if you think about it, this is essentially the same as always throwing out the votes from people who visit your picture via the link. If you collect votes from group A and B, but you only count the votes from group A if they agree with the votes from group B, then you're really only counting votes from group B! All the extra votes really give you is the ability to brag that X many people voted on your picture.)
This seems like the simplest way to prevent Digg-cheating, although there may be others. Still unresolved is how to solve the general problem of "gaming" in traditional media and the blogosphere. For the foreseeable future, it's going to be the simple truth that if a major media outlet wants to run a story, it will be heard, and if no media outlet wants to run it, it won't be heard, regardless of how many viewers or readers would have voted in some hypothetical poll that, yes, they want to read that story, and yes, they liked it afterward. That's true for Internet articles as well, except to the extent that a deserving article might be rescued from obscurity by Digg, but the more that system can be gamed, the less it will reward articles that really deserve it. Digg is gameable because power users can recruit votes from their friends; the media and the blogosphere are so obviously "gameable" that we don't even call it "gameable," because "power users" — media outlets and A-list bloggers — can run whatever they want. Right now, the only way I can think of to change this situation that is even logically possible, would be for a site like Digg to adopt some version of the random-sampling algorithm, and to continue growing in power until a significant percentage of the public (not just Internet users, but everybody) relied on it for information. Then, if you had something important to say, people would hear it, but you wouldn't be able to cheat your way to the top.
The ultimate irony is that Alternet's story may never have seen the light of day, if it hadn't been the beneficiary of the same gameable, non-meritocratic inefficiencies that exist in the media-blogo-outrage-o-sphere, just as they exist on Digg. Yes, the Alternet story deserved to be heard, but you don't get the publicity you deserve, you get the publicity that you organize, and Alternet had the organizational publicity structure in place to get their voice heard. If a kid blogging from his bedroom had infiltrated the Digg Patriots group and made essentially the same discovery, would anybody ever have heard about it? (Well, maybe, because of the political hot-button factor — but even then, only after the story had been picked up by a major site like Alternet.) A truly meritocratic Digg algorithm could make it possible to get a good story out without a lot of organizational support behind it — and to ensure that an organized effort can't kill a good story either.
Yes... a simple fix...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
We have found the conspiracy...and it's a bunch of conservatives!
Seriously, I listen to Rush every day, so I'm surprised and shocked. SHOCKED!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I have been yelping for about a year and I see the owners of places abusing the crap out of that system. I now actually have yelp staffers emailing me asking me to change my reviews at the bequest of an owner of a restaurant or it will be removed...
Slashdot had this problem long before Digg even existed or was even an idea.
CmdrTaco tried several ways of dealing with it, but it still exists today. Shill accounts designed to moderate down a disliked opinion. Mod down mobs. I have seen this stuff in action on lots of people's posts.
Typically the shill actions and mob actions get undone by the general populace but you can see the effects by looking at the moderation of a hot topic post. 30+ moderations with a crapload of overrated,troll, etc.. when the post was 100% op topic are a prime example of this.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
aka worthless.
The fix is just to go to Slashdot for all your news, ever.
Slashdot is never wrong, right?
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
I read the primary news sources already, so have read most of digg articles. Slashdots seems to find the gems from obscure sources. I like it better.
Hey, find me the research that shows leftists burying stories on Digg, and then you can have your hissy fit
I'll wait...
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Is it really "leftardism" if both sides are doing it? That would make the rights "leftards" and hell - that may very well tear the fabric of space-time apart!
No.
Burying any article/opinion just because you disagree with it is wrong. Worse, organizing large "gangs" of people who share your beliefs to bury stories against your beliefs is wrong.
Doesn't matter who is doing it. Just because this article discusses some right-leaners buring leftist stories, doesn't mean it doesn't happen the other way, and is just as wrong.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
is that it lets people moderate AND post at the same time. That is the #1 reason why it often degenerates into ideological and immature flame wars.
Ahhh slashdot, where an AC anecdote contradicting the story gets an insightful mod.
Well as of 13 minutes after he posted he's not showing insightful. He's at -1 now. Could it be that there are people here at /. that bury comments they don't like?
Seriously, why is everyone suddenly acting all surprised that this sort of thing goes on at places that make it possible? There wasn't much outcry at all a couple years ago when there was a bury brigade that spent all sorts of time making sure that any Digg submission regarding Little Green Footballs was blasted from the front page of Digg ASAP.
I guess it is only an issue now because the left's ox is being gored which is a serious violation of fairness, as opposed to when the right's ox is being gored which is considered to be entirely fair.
If I have to choose between gangs of diggers and gangs of buryers, I'll take the gangs of diggers.
I'd rather see what is most popular, rather than not see what is most unpopular.
But I think the suggested random voting is best.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
No, it's that one particular right wing group took it even further. Both sides were doing it, the right was just more organized about it. Which seems like a fairly common scenario; the right and left try to swing narratives in their direction, but the right is generally more effective at it. If a group of likeminded users happens to vote up or bury stories, it's mildly damaging. If each of the users registers dozens of accounts, hides behind proxies to circumvent bans, takes orders from a single user as to which stories to bury, etc., it's downright destructive. This particular group was managing to bury 90% of the stories they disagreed with in three hours or less, drastically altering the balance of the front page.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Same thing around here. For some reason the early Internet population was rightish leaning (not neo-con Right, more like small-L libertarian right), but nowadays the trend is reversed. The general population is more left leaning. Some of it may be because the US had a larger early Internet presence. I think it's also because early on it was more of the intellectual elite and now even the common rabble is out blathering their opinions on the Internet.
I've seen comments on Digg that were spot on about a topic regarding the facts and it would get buried into oblivion because it didn't mesh with the group think. It doesn't matter what the facts are, if you say something that doesn't jibe with what people believe, they'll consider it garbage.
It also varies with time. Many times a topic will get posted multiple times and the same comment will be dugg high one time and then another, it will get buried into oblivion. It's a really interesting phenomena.
We like to hear our beliefs re-enforced. If the facts match our beliefs, more the better; if they don't, well people will just consider it false - regardless of the truth.
I see folks who condemn Talk Radio for creating opinion. I think it's the other way around. I think those guys listen to their callers and get the "pulse" of their beliefs and then just ratchet it up while including the audience's common fears and resentments - I'm not going to mention them here because I know it'll start a whole off-topic posts.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
But this, I think, is a fallacy. If a story's ranking is artificially inflated, then the extra eyeballs for that story have to come from somewhere, and they come from users paying less attention to the other stories that the phony up-and-comer pushed out of the way. Artificially bumping a story up is just as harmful as artificially burying a story, but the harm is distributed among many innocent victims, not just one.
Nah, burying skews votes by not allowing corrections. Lets imagine that there are 50 people who are gaming the system by being an organized collective and that Digg needs 50 buries to kill a story. If it was Reddit, the 50 downvotes could be balanced by, say 100 upvotes. But on Digg, not even 1000 'diggs' can counter the 50 buries. This allows a small group to have a significant chilling effect and effectively a veto on the content. Artificially bumping up is much less harmful.
This space for rent.
Which is why burying is worse. Burying is act of preventing people from hearing differing opinions. While it is true that artificially inflating the importance of information also has negative effect, many different viewpoints can be overinflated, so we still end up with a variety of opinions. A comment system allows all to reflect on those opinions.
It is true that groups can game the system to inflate the ranking of stories, but look at it this way. On has a finite amount of time. It is relatively trivial to use the time to bury selective stories, but becomes more complex if one wants to do the same thing by inflation. One has to inflate a larger number of stories, and at the same time others are doing the same with stories they agree with. All sides are probably going to inflate the stories that reflect best on them, as inflating politically correct but embarrassing stories would not be beneficial.
At the end of the day, and inflation policy is more likely to result is a selection of the best stories from a variety of opinions, while a bury policy will likely cause the best stories to be buries simply because a few people disagree with the viewpoint. The question is one interested in presenting information that people can choose from, or if presenting an opinion in hopes that everyone will agree.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Despite the fact that they are involve the public more directly and more immediately than any democratic or community based voting or collective decision making system has in the past, internet sites where visitors decide on something still rely on honesty and impartial decision making (with respect to the purpose of the vote) by the voters in order to produce a non skewed result.
Like any voting process whose outcome is meant to reflect the "will of the people", voters must vote only once so everyone has an equal voice, and no voter must be unduly influenced by biased interests. To correctly reflect the views of everyone on the internet, a vote would have to include a significant random sample of internet users, which is impossible. Further, due to the nature of the Internet and web sites, even detecting a biased, stacked or invalid vote is nearly impossible.
While this is obvious to some, it's worth stating explicitly that just because a voting process takes place on the internet doesn't mean it's fair and balanced, and just because something is posted on the internet doesn't mean that it's true.
It can be a shock to those who believe humanity is a step away from an internet based golden age of online government where corrupt bureaucrats and overpaid staff are eliminated, but the internet is just a better way to communicate than we've had in the past. The value of communications has always depended on whom you are talking to :)
Erik
I'm genuinely curious. I haven't metamoderated in well over 7, maybe 8 years. But I'm wondering, is it working? Has it worked before?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
If the near epileptic fit the left had over Bush didn't clue anyone in... how can you be surprised or dismayed by some from the right? After there are zealots on both sides and needless to say, their actions sell news. The news doesn't care about the majority of conservatives or liberals who act rationally, its more fun to find the loons.
The only President the US needs is one who can stand up to Congress and beat them down with the bully pulpit and get this country's finances in order. What we have now is same crap we had with Bush for 6 years, anything goes as one party in power is always ruinous for the US
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Imagine going out in public and voicing your opinion, then immediately after having 30 people stand in line to punch you in the face for it.
This is essentially what is happening online and to an extent has always happened. I've been online since 1993 and remember it being the same way back then. Anonymity + opinions = abuse.
The fact that it's politics today just reflects that it was politics back with Bush. The right is getting back at the left for the vitriolic rhetoric they laid on Bush/Cheney/Palin. You could call it karma if you want I guess.
I mostly abstain from posting on the net these days. I like to read comments but I don't post often for this very reason. It's not that I care about being modded down for my opinions so much as I just no longer see the value in it. Comments on websites are often a cesspool of illiterate, bigoted, biased crap.
I guess what I am getting at is, this is nothing new. Not sure why this is suddenly in the forefront again but it does seem cyclical, every few years it comes up again and people act all butt hurt for a while, then the pendulum swings their way again and the complaints go away.
Both sides were doing it
Got any citations to back that up? Go do your own study, then you'll be allowed to spout that shit.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
It's absurd for a leftist group of people organized via the Digg "shout" system of broadcasting instructions of friends, to complain about a far smaller group of conservatives doing the same exact thing via Yahoo groups.
The proof is in the pudding. Every conservative comment on Digg is buried to hell and back. The front page of Digg is constantly full of pro-Omaba and Huffington post stories. If there really is such a massive conspiracy, why is it having no effect?
The person who "uncovered" this provides no proof for the most dramatic claim, that some people are using multiple accounts - he just speculates it is so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So there are some part's of Mr. Haselton's argument that presuppose a certain purpose to Digg, which may not actually be the purpose that the majority of Digg users care about. (Also worth thinking about is that the purpose of Digg, from the point of view of those running it, is to make money; irrespective of whether the users are happy or the best stories get on the main page...)
The only way to game that system would be to organize a group of dedicated Digg users so enormous that they constituted a significant percentage of all users on the system — something pretty hard to do without getting caught.
This distinctly presupposes a purpose to Digg. From the point of view of many, it doesn't make sense to "get caught" with respect to getting a "significant percentage of all users on the system" to vote a certain way. If the majority of the community is up-voting (or down-voting) a certain way, then the community's feelings are being correctly reflected in the story-ranks. (To those who consider Digg to be a popularity engine, this is perfectly fair.)
If each user limited to themselves to only one Digg account like they were supposed to? And if they focused not on burying stories, but on digging stories that promoted their viewpoints? Just as bad. It just doesn't sound as bad.
It's not just that it doesn't sound as bad... it's that it really isn't as bad... at least for those people who think Digg is "supposed" to be a popularity engine, where each user gets a single chance to "have their voice heard". (In this view, voting more than once is wrong; anything else is fair game.)
Yes, if the purpose of Digg is to really find "the best material" then voting brigades are an attempt to game the system. But honestly if the purpose is to curate the best material, then it's been shown time and again that self-selected, open voting systems suck. You need to either hire curators or use tuned sampling methods (as is done on Slashdot and as is suggested by Mr. Haselton). And even these have plenty of problems with being gamed.
All that to say that I think you need to first decide what goal you are trying to optimize for, before suggesting sweeping changes. I honestly don't think that those who run Digg, or those who use it, are really looking to have a ranking system that promotes "the best" material. They are looking for a ranking system that engages users: and a (broken) popularity system does that just fine.
[citation needed]
Palin is a MILF!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
We also need a populace which will support Obama if he leans left and shows jerks like Palin just how big his balls really are.
But that's the true problem. We have an uneducated, jaded populace that doesn't vote their heart (if they vote at all), we have two parties who don't want to lose any control on government they have to allow a major third party, and we have a bunch of fat lazy rich people who also control much of the media who want to maintain their control on government as well.
Obama was a good choice, IMHO, but he's basically been given crap to start with, and anything less than diamonds from that crap is spun as failure by the political machine. No he's not perfect, but the entire country has been positioned as center right, and our system of checks and balances, while good, has been pushed to the right hard over the past few decades and we don't have enough force to push it back. Even if we did it will take time as our system of government was built to create "stability", and major changes are sometimes harder for no other reason than it's hard to change the status quo.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
(Note that if you think about it, this is essentially the same as always throwing out the votes from people who visit your picture via the link. If you collect votes from group A and B, but you only count the votes from group A if they agree with the votes from group B, then you're really only counting votes from group B! All the extra votes really give you is the ability to brag that X many people voted on your picture.)
No, I don't think so, at least as long as your threat model is "most votes on items are unbiased, but some small number are attacked." Suppose pictures (to stay with the OP's model) are being voted on, with most pictures getting a small positive response (say, a typical picture gets a 1% positive score), and a few getting as much as 99% positive votes, with each picture getting, say, a few thousands of responses. In theory, in this situation, you know the "likeability" of any given picture to a few %. Suppose you want to test the high ranking ones for attempts to game the system. To do that you might get as few as 10 votes from people you select at random. Now, 10 votes would not be nearly enough to distinguish between (say) "50% like" and "90% like," but it would be enough to distinguish between "99% like" and "1%" like or, for that matter, "50% like" and "1 % like."
So, if you think of the overall votes as providing you with statistics, and the much smaller number of 'random' votes as providing a go/no go confidence indicator to detect gaming of the system, both are useful, and neither can replace the other. (You can use the tools of operational research to tell you, for a given confidence level, just how many random votes you need to detect gaming for any given situation.)
Worse, organizing large "gangs" of people who share your beliefs to bury stories against your beliefs is wrong.
But that's exactly what Digg is designed to do.
On Digg, you mark people as friends - and then you are allowed to "shout" instructions to them.
So what naturally happens, is that large groups of people friend each other and "shout" to bury or digg up stories and comments. Traditionally these have been very large groups of left leaning Digg users.
You might think it's wrong to do this but Digg was designed around the concept that you can bury people with no penalty and they make it easy to coordinate. Unlike Slashdot you can still even write comments after you bury people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's easier to do that when you can scare the crap out of people with stuff you made up and that most of the time is demonstrably false. The liberals by encouraging more intelligent people to join up are at a disadvantage since they can't just make up science and history to back their points. But hey, that's why fascism is going to be with us for quite some time, it's easier than convincing people to act in the best interests of everybody.
Not really. A large enough brigade to bury a story using random sampling would have to be a significant fraction of the active userbase in order to be able to reliably influence stories. On average any individual account is only going to see a fraction of the total stories and only over time will they get more. This means that in order to influence a story you need several orders of magnitude more people (50000 instead of 50) with the corresponding difficulty of organising and near impossibility of secrecy. It also prevents 'flash mob' style behaviour where the group can organise a bury vote shortly after the story appears preventing it from being seen by many other users who could possibly upvote it and ruin their efforts. If it were possible to organise 5-10% of Digg users (secretly or openly) to promote/bury particular types of stories I would have a hard time saying it was gaming the system because it now legitimately represents the outlook of a significant portion of their users rather than a fractional percentage.
The other influence it would have would be to shift the dynamic of power to people who regularly use Digg for extended periods of time since the random sample would be periodic. Like wikipedia this would shift the direction of content into the hands of power users rather than random joes. As well it would prevent use of alternate accounts and IP spoofing to inflate ratings as they would have to spend a significant amount of time on digg to rate any given story. It would also prevent people who have no interest in Digg itself but are told by a influencial member of their political group to downvote/upvote an article or do so as part of their 'service' to their political agenda.
While it is quite possible that someone would discover new ways to game the system it would raise the effort required to do so signifcantly and help avoid the appearence of political bias which could be the death of a social system like digg.
... it will only end up moderated down.
Seriously, why do we call it "moderation" when there is seldom anything moderate about it? It would be better called "scoring" or "random review", since that is a better description of what actually comes from it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The main problem is that a simple up/down rating conveys too little information. There are various ways to address this.
One method involves tailoring the ratings according to what the reader likes to see. This is accomplished by having the user "follow" specific raters (diggers); in other words, only the ratings done by the raters being followed matter to a given reader. Deciding what raters to follow could be done manually or automatically (or both). One automatic method is fairly data intensive, but would work as follows: for any story you choose to rate up, the system could look at who else rated the story up and make them potential followees, assuming they keep popping up this way.
Another method of addressing the root problem is to simply have lots of different kinds of ratings, and then let users assemble their own formulas for what ratings they care about. Here the difficulty is in deciding how many and what kind of ratings to use, and how to update them to keep up with the times. Perhaps there could be a fixed set and a system for proposing new types of ratings that could be moderated.
With any solution, there is the issue that users will narrow their focus down to only stories that follow their own thinking. This is what people want, to some extent. But it may also help keep people narrow-minded. Perhaps there should be a side-column in any feed that offers random stories.
The conservatives want to take us back to a reality that never existed and the liberals want to take us forward to a reality that will probably never exist. But, at least with the liberals, there's a possibility that it will happen, whereas the conservatives refuse to acknowledge that they don't know shit about history.
I dunno if I'd compare them on reality so much as human nature. The so-called "conservatives" pretty much exemplify the worst aspects of human nature, realize this, and try to convince us that it's actually better that way. The poorly-named "liberals" have the same nature, but mentally twist it around into some warped denial of human nature, completely missing the fact that they themselves are maintaining the sickness that would have to be overcome to have their wonderful utopia.
Please give examples, with citations, of left-wing groups that are doing the same on Digg as the cited right-wing groups.
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
Slashdot had this problem long before Digg even existed or was even an idea.
Slashdot actually has two systems in place that make comments much better moderated here than on Digg:
1) Metmod. I know lots of people think metamod doesn't work, but I think it does - it's imperfect but it's the best way to avoid handing moderation to people who make moderations most people disagree with.
2) Posting rule. This might be even more effective - the fact fact that you cannot moderate AND post. Since most people want to weigh in on a topic it means people moderating are willing to hang back and moderate up stuff the agree with, more than moderate down... yes you could bury a bunch of stuff but at the risk of posts you think are good getting buried too. This arms race means that generally more posts will get modded up.
There's even kind of a third one, limited moderation. On Digg you can bury and upvote all day long, as much as you like - even comments have a limit on the number in a certain time period, but not digg/bury! So it'ssuper easy to bury something you only mildly disagree with instead of putting any thought into the moderation. When you have only five moderation points you think way more heavily if something is worth upvoting or downvoting.
Basically Slashot as a whole is just way more thoughtful about moderation and encourages moderators to really think about what they are doing, Digg does none of that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Bury Brigade is effectively bumping anything they don't bury. As a result the entire site appears to lean in the direction that they desire. It is much more insidious than bumping because after the Bury brigade has been through, new viewers don't know that there were alternate choices/view points available.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
I figured out a solution about two year ago.. I just stopped visiting the site and the problem went away.
no-one else ever saw the articles
Don't forget the articles were originally somewhere on a real site, where people read them (like, Huffington Post). And the Digg button was right there... so no small number of people would be sufficient to overwhelm even a moderate number of people who read a site regularly and used the Digg button. It's not like burying a story on Slashdot where you would have no way to know Slashdot might have been talking about a story.
That's one of the things that strikes me as really funny about the complaint, is that you naturally had large groups of people working moderations for a story just because of the Digg button. You could only bury stuff from small sites that no-one was visiting enough to Digg up anyway!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Digg began to suck really hard during 2008 election phase, which attracted alot of left-wing Obama lovers and hasn't recovered ever since, since most conservative and libertarian members left during that time (since it was no longer for them to discuss anything political without being called all sorts of names).
I remember the times when Ron Paul was popular and those were much better times. Today, if you wish to go there, it's best to stick to images of lolcats and avoid any threads with political discussion, because if you don't agree with majority, you'll be buried into oblivion.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
Digg's and Slashdot's faults are pretty much the same: they use a moderation system that doesn't allow the end-user to filter out bad moderators.
That's sort of correct, but in the end wrong.
Because the Slashdot moderation system is designed to automatically filter out bad moderators, over time. Sure the user cannot do it but the user shouldn't have to.
Meta moderation can identify people whose moderations are undone more often than not, and simply not hand them moderation. With Digg you have no governance over who can moderate, ever.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Read my reply to your sibling.
Also, find me the part where I said I didn't think there are any leftist groups anywhere else possibly doing the same thing.
I'll wait...
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
For the last 5 years or so 'left' or 'right' was determined by whether you supported Bush or not, specifically as related to the wars. Debates about economics gave way to debates about surges and leaked videos. And most of America was upset about Bush tricking us into attacking Iraq, so it's not surprising that most people online appeared opposed to Bush as well. Even if you were a libertarian, a lot of your posts might appear liberal, because you opposed Bush. Hating Bush almost became a national dementia.
Now, for various reasons the political debate has focused back on economic issues, and people are finding they aren't on the left when it comes to economics.
Qxe4
That's why people cry about it. You find that most groups think something is ok when they do it and evil when the other guys do it. I've had lefties tell me that trying to suppress righty speed is "Preserving free speech," and righties tell me that Obama is an asshole for having government secrets but that Bush had to have them to keep us safe.
What it comes down to is the zealots believe they have the One True Way(tm). Because of that, whatever is necessary in defense of that way is acceptable. The ends justify the means and so on. Likewise, because they are the One True Way, the Other Guys are just plain wrong, Anything they do is evil and must be stopped.
So, since Digg is heavily lefty biased, they will of course scream and bitch should any righties try to use the system against them. When the suppress righty shit it is for the greater good, when the righties suppress lefty shit it is because they are evil.
The mentality of zealots is generally extremely close. It is just the particular ideology they subscribe to that is different. The methods and thought process are the same.
I mean, if they rounded up a bunch of people who didn't care one way or the other about the story and convinced them to vote anyways - definite cheat.
If one person creates a hundred Digg ids and votes with all of them - definite cheat.
But if 100 people who genuinely like or do not like a story all log in once to say so, isn't that what the site is for?
The problem isn't multiple people voting, its the fact that everyones votes count towards the rating I see - even the votes of people who I' don't agree with. Digg tries to create a single online community, when it would more usefully facilitate the growth of multiple communities, and help people find which oneS they most belong in. Let the Tea Partiers digg as much as they like, and they will usefully tell other Tea Partiers about things they are interested in, and won't bother the rest of us one bit.
(And then, as the author of the main article above suggests, throw in the odd random story anyways, to keep people from getting _too_ balkanized.)
That's a pretty shitty world you want to live in.
The smart people who actually research things and tend to follow evidence are supposed to leave the political debate to the idiots who just care about the next election.
What a wonderful system that would be. Oh wait a minute, that'd be what America has at the moment. How is that working out?
And let me guess it is fair and balanced to hear from "John Smith PhD" on one side of the argument and "John Jones who read the data published by John Smith and has a better idea but never bothered with elitish University" on the other. Equal time!
http://www.digg.com
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
If a cabal forms then they'll benefit by being shown what they want shown. No one else will be hurt. Indeed the "bury" signal from such a cabal is useful to the opponents of the cabal because the Netflix Prize algorithms just strengthen the a negative correlation. In other words, if you hate the cabal, a "bury" signal from them is a "like" signal to you and others similar to you.
Of course, this kind of relativistic prediction of preferences has been obvious for many years now. The only question is: Why has it taken so long for collaborative content sites to realize it is not just "a" solution -- it is "the" solution?
I have my ideas about the answer to that question, but suffice it to say, the vast majority of collaborative content sites have priorities that aren't really about collaborative content.
Seastead this.
Fox News viewers.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
... even the common rabble is out blathering their opinions on the Internet.
Ah, that brings me back. "How to identify a libertarian 101". You forgot "sheeple", though.
By the way, IT students do not make up the "technical elite", even though they like the sound of that.
The vast majority of -1 votes here are no more than "disagree" or "failed to comprehend" votes. I've seen it over and over again; someone takes the time to write a decent post, and some wag comes in and hits it -1, which is never corrected, and the post is lost to most readers.
Up-voting would raise any post that *any* moderator felt had merit, because no "+1 agree/interesting/useful" vote could ever be countered. And THAT in turn means that finally, taking the time to moderate is worthwhile - because your work can't be undone, and posts that have merit would rise despite the fact that the content might be disagreeable and/or controversial.
And if anyone ever up-voted a true troll... GNAA, frost piss, etc., that's when the site moderators could step in and flag that account "no mod points."
Slashdot moderation could actually work if it was strictly upwards trending. As it is, it's laughable - you have to browse at -1 to see the most interesting posts, those that carry views that are not mainstream. And the first thing that does is expose you to GNAA, etc.
It's really too bad. Slashdot could be so much better than it is.
As for Digg... I really don't care. It's like the E Entertainment channel of the Internet over there. Full of content signifying nothing.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.