Digg accused for fake votes 'Is this the end of the front page era?'

From the time I’ve started networking with bloggers I’ve known that most people have the same dream of making it to the front page of a social bookmarking site like digg, after repeated failures most of them have started to give up, they say “Its not fair, we write better articles than them, but they are the ones who usually make it”, over here ‘them’ is referred to big online publications such as Guardian, Techcrunch, Mashable and BoingBoing.

Most of these poor guys (including me ) have the same thought that they are the ones who accumulated traffic first and thats why they get to the front page with the use of their existing audience. Well that is pretty much true, thanks to the early start all of them had the advantage of being the most influential on all social networks.

Due to 14 years of experience in life, I always believed in the concept that there are always brighter sides (or darker) of everything, it was just recently that I discovered about what was happening, I mean just two days ago from one of my friends who is a Digg power user and a highly skilled developer. As a web addict he couldn’t stop his curiosity and that lead to a shocking discovery.

“They haven’t provided me any justifying answers till now” says Daniel who has been using Digg from the time it got its popularity with a screen name Hediggme. He was a constant user of the Digg API and his suspicions made him look closer into the Digg algorithm, his fantastic developing and analyzing skills revealed that from the time the new Digg has been made public there has been 175 fake Digg accounts which have been the main source of front page submissions, moreover these accounts have been used together to boost popularity.

The first thought which occurred to us was that maybe Digg wanted to keep up their reputation of having thousands of diggs on their front page stories by making these fake diggs, or maybe because people have stopped digging in the new Digg. This would have been fine as we too are born spammers , but my not so social partner, Bittu N who himself is a great Digg fan and developer made another observation after he went to investigate about the news I gave him.

According to him, the fake accounts have a similar pattern of submissions and Diggs, that is most of the time they boost the popularity of a few selected domains, and as expected they were – Techcrunch, Guardian, BoingBoing and Dailymail.co.uk, I really don’t know if Mashable also was a part of it.

Another common thing in these sites is that they are all Digg’s publishing partners, it could have worked like a swap of fame as most of these sites helped promote Digg by writing and creating a huge buzz and this maybe Digg’s return gift to them, but something much worse is that they are actually filling up the front page with stories which they are paid for, without the users knowing. Digg’s revenues have fallen a lot since Jay Adelson left, so this maybe a solid way to grow.

In the past one week many Digg users have written about this to Digg and its been followed by a few blog posts as well, unable to take the pressure of the tech community, it was forced to make a blog post claiming all of the accusations as wrong, but lately he had to agree that they did create fake accounts, but for the sake of testing and identifying security loopholes and errors. This truly wasn’t justifying as submitting their publishing partners to the front page is not a part of testing.

This blog post was more like adding fuel to fire, it actually brought in more attention towards this and it resulted in a lot more buzz on this. Maybe thats where Digg misses Jay Adelson, who had managed such situations extremely well in the past. The highly frustrated Kevin made two comments on his post, which didn’t result in much either -

We’ve never taken a single dime from a publisher for any activity on Digg (outside of standard ad units). We’ve used test accounts since day one and will continue to use them as we validate our various spam/promotion algorithms.

I know you love a good conspiracy but it was honestly a developer testing a slew of different things. To think we would have to “game ourselves” is silly, we’d just write code to put a story on the homepage, we wouldn’t need test accounts.

Also a developer named Thirumalai reported this on his blog and I think he was the first to have observed this, his blog has got huge fame after he reported this and you can see 5 to 6 posts on this topic from the past 5 days. You can read his posts here.

Conclusion

This makes it really frustrating for marketers, as most of us have spent hours together to create influential accounts and promote our stories on Digg, and such news breaks the user’s confidence in web 2.0. Digg is still a huge source of entertainment, traffic and news, but I have a feeling that this may no longer be in the future. We try our best to provide you with such news, so in order to keep yourself updated do subscribe to our blog feed and follow me on Twitter.