This week’s edition of This Week in Tech, one of today’s more popular podcasts hosted by TechTV luminaries including Leo Laporte and DIGG founder Kevin Rose (my favorite podcast, actually), features the FovererGeek-DIGG issue as the first order of business.
The edition is actually entitled “TWiT 51: DIGG This.”
To summarize the discussion, Kevin basically provides a bit more information compared to what was considered a non-response. He starts out by saying he’d been DIGGing articles by a poster who actually turned out to be a spammer, and by coincidence DUGG 17th in line for two stories submitted by the spammer, who seemed to be using a bot to DIGG stories.
As for the ForeverGeek banning, Kevin claims that a user had been creating multiple accounts under the same IP address to submit FG stories.
Kevin further expounds on the ways posters game the system by spamming. Since front-paging of articles also depends on the credibility of the submitting account, spammers usually go the route of establishing credibility first, by submitting quality content, before turning to spamming a few weeks after, when the account has already gained trust points (say, from “friends” or fellow DIGGers).
As for the algorithm by which stories are promoted to DIGG’s front page, Kevin admits that this is not so transparent after all. Front-paging is dependent not only on the raw magnitude of DIGGs, but a host of factors, including the credibility of the submitting account, time of day submitted, category, raw number of DIGGs, karma (or credibility) behind the source site or DIGGers, user reports, and whether DIGGers are using web proxies.
For now, I’ve leave it to our readers to decide if this is a better response than the one written on DIGG the Blog. Of course, the podcast is likely to be biased towards DIGG.
Personally, I think DIGG may have been too haphazard in banning sites and individuals based on their spammer-detection algorithm. I mean, theoretically I can spam DIGG using submissions of sites I am not affiliated with, and those sites would subsequently be banned, in turn. Maybe this can be yet another way to game DIGG!
Been following this issue from the start and every articles has been very interesting to read. I think this might be their downfall.
Update: I fixed the broken formatting. Sorry about that!
No, I don’t think so. Kevin sounded pretty credible in the TWiT podcast. I suspect this whole thing was one assumption piling up onto another and the end result was a collision between conspiracy theories and anti-spam initiatives.
It is something worth watching though.
Sounds like Mr. Racoma should’ve asked more questions before jumping to conclusions. Kevin sounds sincere. In the meantime, Digg’s reputation is injured, all because someone can make claims and assumptions on the Internet with only one-sided research.
(I actually never use digg.com)
Link fixed. Please check here:
http://forevergeek.com/news/fgdigg_issue_on_twit.php
Thanks for the comments. I, too, did not doubt Kevin’s sincerity while I was listening to the episode. Of course, I had assumed that TWiT would likely have a bias towards Kevin’s case, because of his affiliation with TWiT.
I actually enjoyed listening to how DIGG actually does it (promote stories to frontpage) which I used to think was only based on raw DIGGs.
And yes, I do use DIGG. I’m a great fan of DIGG. I listen to DIGGnation every week. Things like Macgyver’s earlier analyses, while seeming one-sided, jolted the whole “collaborative” web thing into perspective–makes us think and rethink our missions as conduits for information exchange.
At any rate, Kevin Rose himself admitted that the system has its quirks, and they’re doing what they can to fix it.
And the scenario I pointed out in the last paragraph, don’t you think that’s very much possible? If I want to have FG banned, then I’d spam DIGG to hell with links to FG. Now that would cause headaches to site owners and DIGG admins alike.
Haven’t had time to listen to TWiT. I’ll take a listen tomorrow. I will however say this. I’m kind of disappointed that digg’s algorithm actually includes “time of day”. Considering news doesn’t stop and there are those of us that are night owls, it’s rather stupid that time of day makes a difference.
As far as their spammer detection algorithms, obviously they have some issues. The fact that he (Kevin) was digging spammer articles? Come on.
How much you want to be there’s also a whitelist somewhere. Can you imagine the contraversy if slashdot got banned from digg? FG would be piddly compared to that – no offense.
All in all, I’ll probably still use Digg based on the fact that it still finds some interesting reads every so often (lately it’s been crap) but there is definitely some serious issues that need to be solved and were highlighted by FG’s actions. I’m glad to be a reader of FG.
A one sided podcast is exactly that – one sided. It is easy to say something without having the opposing party there to give a rebuttal :)
If Digg is guilty of anything, it is in not developing a way to combat incredibly sophisticated spammers who spend months posting credible content in order to be able to profit from it longterm (which is a problem we have barely seen thus far). Whoever was behind this must be besides themself in that they had managed to place three of these identities on Kevin’s friend list. And because they got a little sloppy/lazy, they lost those three and 13 more. I would presume that Kevin will add an algorithm looking for order of Digging patterns after this but I doubt anyone will make the same mistake again.
Listening to TWiT 51 now, Of course Kevin will sound sincere he has to keep the VC sources happy.
Why waste time on TWiT Use his Beer drinking podcast to Diggnation to defend his million dollar baby.
Too many other sources and digg clones to get stories now. Stopped using Digg after the venture capital story broke and the lame Diggnation vidcast.
Who cares about Digg. Lets quit putting up stuff on Digg.
Amusing. Finally listened to the TWiT. They have moderators (so thereby hierarchy). And they think that ForeverGeek is “1″ user instead of multiple contributors. How lame.
It sounds like Kevin Rose might not be involved (perhaps) BUT it also confirms against that users still don’t have full control.
Very amusing. He claims “no editors” but there are “moderators”. Uhh.. yeah.
Hi everybody! Wanna see my cool pages?
[url=][/url]