December 5th, 2006
Yes Virginia, there is SPAM on Digg
by Joshua Porter | 
20 Comments | shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/527
When social design works, you get SPAM. When it works well, the community helps get rid of it.
Cnet’s Elinor Mills, in a piece describing Digg rigging on a wide scale, writes:
“dubious Internet marketers are planting stories, paying people to promote items, and otherwise trying to manipulate rankings on Digg and other so-called social-media sites like Reddit and Delicious to drum up more links to their Web sites and thus more business, experts say.”
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, at this point. (see Brian Clarke’s writeup) Digg’s gaming issues have been widely known for many months now. In Digg’s Design Dilemma, I pointed out that the design of the site had a lot to do with the gaming going on there. But, I should add, it also had a lot to do with the growth of the site…so there’s no clear answer about what to do.
It’s becoming clear that any successful site sees its share of gaming. Even Del.icio.us, who refused to comment on the Mills story, has seen gaming. And this is the way that media has worked for a long time. Who controls the media controls the story. That’s why we’re seeing so much SPAM/gaming…we should expect it in any successful social site.
Real money changing hands
It’s getting to the point where real money is changing hands to game Digg. Mills writes:
“Companies charge as much as $15,000 to get content up on Digg, said Neil Patel, chief technology officer at the Internet marketing firm ACS. If a story becomes popular on Digg and generates links back to a marketer’s Web site, that site may rise in search engine results and will not have to spend money on search advertising, he said.”
I think the observation is interesting, the inference shaky. There are people who think that all they need to do is to game Digg for their advertising? Is there any example of a company who survives on Digg gaming alone? I doubt it.
(Update…Neil Patel, quoted in the story, blogs about how Mills has inaccurate info)
In addition, Mills quotes Barry Parr, who makes a controversial comment, to say the least:
“Digg and others are working hard to deal with this kind of abuse,” Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr wrote on his blog this week. “But until it is eliminated, the credibility of social-news sites will be in question.”
Credibility in Question?
Hmmm…let’s compare this to another abusive environment where we might have questions about credibility. I wonder if the lobbying in Washington is hurting the credibility of the U.S. government. Until lobbying by Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Insurance goes away, the credibility of our government will be in question. Ha! It may be true, but that doesn’t mean it will be going away any time soon, or that over time it lessens…at this point most people simply accept evil interests as part of the deal. I think maybe we should accept that SPAM will be an ongoing problem for social sites…after all, they’re social sites.
So, let’s agree right now. The credibility of social news sites will always be in question, OK? And, for that matter, so it should be for non-social news sites!
Nobody said that putting the “social” in play on web sites would mean an end to corrupt behavior. In fact, the opposite may be true. As we model real-life behavior better and better online, as we open up communication channels and people increasingly live their social lives online, we’re going to model every part of those lives…the good and the bad.
What to do about it?
But what can we do about it? I think the answer comes from the community of the site. At some point you cannot rely on algorithms to do your SPAM harvesting for you, you have to rely on the wisdom of real people, because SPAMmers are really smart. Hopefully, crowds are smarter.
To this end both Digg and Reddit claim to have strong communities that self-police. They help drive out SPAM when they recognize it as such, burying stories that don’t seem right. Digg CEO Jay Adelson says:
“There is technical information that only we could know that flags us when someone is attempting to manipulate (stories and rankings)…By merging the algorithms and the people I believe we have a foolproof system.”
“Foolproof”?…I wonder what he means by that…
Links to this Post
Comments
1. Tony 2:39pm, Tue 5th, 2006
Josh, some interesting thoughts.
However, I would like to add that self-policing, when the sites become as big as Digg and Del.icio.us have gotten, may just not be effective.
THe reason is that when things are promoted to the frontpage, they get a ton of exposure very quickly. I would love to know how many uniques visit per minute during the daylight hours on a monday — but I would wager it could be as high as hundreds per minute.
Let’s forget about “gaming” for marketing purposes — if an inappropriate post, say, with leaked information, names, passwords and so on, that would make privacy advocates’ hair curl showed up, what would your reaction be? Well, mine would be absolute horror.
And the problem is that even if its up for 10 minutes, its broad cast to potentially thousands of people — who now can redistribute that page by cc’ing to their friends for their own jollys.
Couldn’t happen? Think again, because it already DID, about two weeks ago, and none of the tech sites caught wind of it.
http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2006/11/22/update-an-unmoderated-digg-leads-to-privacy-disaster/
Summary: a phisher’s exploits on a MySpace Hack were posted to a blog, and then submitted to digg. Tens of thousands of MySpace accounts — emails and pwds were revealed. Not a big deal? Consider that many people use the same combinations over and over and over — including Paypal, and you get an idea of what a privacy disaster this was.
Part of the problem was that it hit news on a Friday, when its like the world is dead to news. Another part of the problem might have been a credibility issue — once the Digg was found out, it was, sure enough, obliterated. No trace of the Digg, no trace of the submitter.
Luckily, however, the submitter continued to yack about his exploits in another comment field of another Digg:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Tomorrow_s_News_MySpace_Phishers_Jailed
At the end of the day, sure, people are gaming digg — it happens when any social enterprise gets big enough, because then it becomes a potentially exploitable commercial entity.
The problem is that the existing level of checks and balances is insufficient when it scales to as large as it currently is. And when it becomes sensitive to marketing abuses, it can also become sensitive to all kinds of ugly hacks as you saw above.
Sorry it was a long reply — but just wanted to make sure everyone knew all of the goings on at Digg … and that while it seems like some people just like to dump on KRo and Co, there are some genuine issues that have the potential to affect many individuals.
And while the refrain of “its their site, they can do what they want with it” chimes in the air, I’d like everyone to consider another phrase (courtesy of the great Stan Lee) … “with great power, comes great responsibility”.
Cheers
t @ dji
2. Josh 2:46pm, Tue 5th, 2006
Tony, I completely agree. The MySpace info leak is another excellent example of how this can get out of hand.
And you’re right…you can’t rely on just the community or just the algorithms…both come into play. However, I’m not convinced that it’s foolproof, and apparently you aren’t, either.
But, then again, what system is? As this unravels, the Mills story is taking a beating (see here). And that suggests that even mainstream media isn’t always “credible”.
I chalk this up to the same lesson we have to learn over and over. Each news story has to be considered on its own merit, not on the writer or publication.
3. Tony 3:00pm, Tue 5th, 2006
Josh, I think that where this is heading is a blend of both — but at the end of the day, there needs to be human editors guiding things.
An ungentlemanly way of putting things at Digg is that by allowing algorithms to control things — at large (they do have moderators, but clearly they are inneffective) — they don’t have to hire enough people to watch things carefully enough … or think about how to arbitrate things.
Here’s another great example of something that flew underneath the radar. John Chow was recently banned from Digg — his blog has been up there a bajillion times. The problem is that getting banned is a largely automatic process — get enough submissions buried under a specific URL, some people say there’s a 10/10 rule (10 buries per post == a buried Digg; 10 buried Diggs == banned URL) for example, and you can get someone’s URL banned.
THe bury button exists so that Digg users can “police” themselves, but you can see that it can also be used for maliciously banning sites that might actually have merit. In order to be re-instated you’d have to email them — but according to a form email that John got, they just don’t reinstate banned URLs, because they would just get buried, then banned again.
Does it need to be as post-hoc as Slashdot — no. But, does every single fp entry need to be watched? It does. Its not that extreme — they just need to have someone watching the door. The frequency new stuff hits the FP isn’t that fast either … probably a new one every 5-10 minutes or so during peak times and much less at off peak times.
Staffing people to make sure that responsible things happen on a website? Its shocking, but maybe itshould be thought of a little more clearly. We’re all in love with Alogorithms, thanks to Google — but maybe Digg should hire someone to put a public face on things, like the equivalent of Matt Cutts, to show that they’re hiring enough people — and doing enough — to make sure shennanigans like that don’t happen.
t @ dji
(again, sorry for the long reply)
4. john beck 1:30am, Mon 19th, 2007
I think the oservation is interesting,the inference shaky.
5. jeff 3:55am, Tue 27th, 2007
Website
Besides hacking myspace deals with hackers using tools that were originally set up for bands and bars / nightclubs to build their friends / fans list. We actually use this one http://www.myfriendbuilder.com/ its really good, but they have to keep up with all the changes myspace does.
6. lina 1:19am, Wed 28th, 2007
I suspect that’s thereason general public want to read blog….Internet visitors generally create blogs to declare themselves or their secret views. Blog grant them same matter on the monitor screen what they specifically needed,so as the above stuffs declared it.
7. Alisya 12:43am, Mon 5th, 2007
I suspect that’s thereason general public want to read blog….Internet visitors generally create blogs to declare themselves or their secret views. Blog grant them same matter on the monitor screen what they specifically needed,so as the above stuffs declared it.
8. shredders 5:00am, Thu 26th, 2007
e had this happen as well. I’ve had articles I’ve written or how-to’s I’ve written show up on other sites without Creative Commons compliance. I think this points out a flaw in the digg model…perhaps they should be using a blacklist that is updated by specific moderators or digg employees?
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