Comments on: Responding to Kevin’s Non-Response Post

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 17:16:11 +0000

Jealous?? Only “Fanboys” of the “I love Kevin Rose” Club would say that.

I stopped using digg a long time ago since he got 2.8 Million Venture Capital to travel with Alex Albrecht Drink beer and make a lame vidcast.

Life continues with out the need for a site like Digg

By: memo

memo — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 00:40:42 +0000

I think Forever Geek is jaelous of digg. This site it’s not as good as digg.com

By: s1lentslayer

s1lentslayer — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 16:05:25 +0000

Is it not possible that they were just buried using the reporting system by diggers? Why must everything be a conspiracy?

By: montoya

montoya — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 06:06:40 +0000

I think it’s interesting that the account “Spitf1re” is gone.

I hate communities like Digg that pretend to be all about “the users” and then use their clout to promote their own interests and exclude others.

By: Stacia

Stacia — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 16:35:15 +0000

I’m not sure if anyone else pointed this out, but there was some speculation with the first story about Sarah Lane’s (Kevin’s ex) engagement not making the front page, despite over 100 diggs:

http://digg.com/technology/Sarah_Lane_-_Former_TechTV_Host_is_Getting_Married

Of course, the digg folks would argue that it received enough “lame” marks.

By: Serg

Serg — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 04:17:37 +0000

Concerned enough to hide your name? :)

This isn’t a conspiracy, it isn’t someone making a fast buck – its about a large website claiming one thing, and doing another. Get off your high horses.

By: concerned

concerned — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 03:49:20 +0000

If this web 2.0 thing hadn’t lead to trillions of barely legal teens trying to make a fast buck on the Web by getting their names and half-baked applications and whatnot out there by diggin’ the crap out of themselves and others (in the most incestuous manner), we could just worry about real issues and not this insanely childish stuff. Sometimes I get really worried that the people posting here or in similar places will actually one day be in positions of power and will then go off the rails as they did with this cr*p. Scary thought.

By: ready71

ready71 — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 01:14:55 +0000

When Kevin Rose was on The Screen Savers, he would show Digg and describe it as his friend’s website. He looked the camera in the eye and lied. At the time, I knew he had a greater role in digg, but gave him the benefit of the doubt. That will never happen again. As far as I’m concerned, he has zero credibility.

http://reddit.com/

By: bonch

bonch — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 22:43:00 +0000

Am I the only one who just doesn’t see a big issue here? The “conspiracy” stuff seems a bit alarmist and goofy. It’s just a tech news website, not some oppressive government.

A second big ol’ article from Forevergeek on this issue seems a bit overkill and, well, overly focused on Digg. It’s not that big a deal. I guess for saying this, I’m a “Digg loyalist” (even though I only check it every other day).

By: Splasho

Splasho — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 21:49:00 +0000

What I find interesting is how they contradicted themselves

By: foreverwrong

foreverwrong — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 21:03:55 +0000

fyi maybe it’s because people like me reported your story as lame and spam

By: William Howardson

William Howardson — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 20:23:32 +0000

I have just found out that my account has been disabled on Digg. They cite ‘misuse’. I will say that I was avidly digging stories that were breaking this news and commenting on these stories. I have done nothing wrong and am not surprised with this development. I do have a screenshot of digg spy that shows they are still burying stories about this news. I am available to talk further about this travesty if you are interested. At this point, I think everyone should do everything in their power to have the truth about digg exposed. It’s a complete sham.

By: DMT

DMT — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 17:03:49 +0000

Busted, I always knew KRose was a fake. Ironically he became the very company he hated so, G4.

By: David

David — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 16:14:23 +0000

Big ups for cliche!

By: Matt Hoffman

Matt Hoffman — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 15:25:58 +0000

i think cliche just smacked everybody in the face.

By: cliche

cliche — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 14:32:27 +0000

It’s a democracy.
The president got caught rigging the votes.
He locks up the reporters who tried reporting it and erases the headlines of newspapers and tv.
Word still gets out and spreads: People are outraged.
President frees the reporters and says that he locked them up because they were terrorists.
He cliams that he was accidentally involved with the vote rigging and gives no other explaination.
He waits until it all blows over and people start saying dumb shit like “who cares”.

Yes, Digg is not a country and Kevin can do whatever he wants with his website. That doesn’t change the fact that what he’s doing is unethical. He makes money off of his users, and is selling something different that what he advertises it as. So the users bought Porsches with Honda Civic engines and people still say dumb shit like “who cares”? You tools!

By: Splasho

Splasho — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 14:15:03 +0000

“On the other hand, banning the url was not going to help digg, and would further fuel the story, that’s absolutely clear to everybody. So I am willing to believe that there was some automated mechanism in place to ban urls, when enough stories were buried (regarless whether that happened by manual manipulation or by democratic vote) in a row. Every spam-measure has a false-positive rate, and so you were unbanned, because it would have been just as as ridicuous to justify your banning, as it was to ban you in the first place.”

Both my submissions were visible for about 3 minutes and then deleted, by hand I am pretty sure (I wasn’t linking straight to ForeverGeek so the URL wasn’t blacklisted)

By: Scott

Scott — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 13:43:47 +0000

You have way too much time on your hands. Who cares?

By: racketboy

racketboy — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 13:34:10 +0000

keep up the good work, guys!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 13:25:56 +0000

It turns out the second from last paragraph that starts with words “Missing Stories:” of his response looks very similar to a block of text he quoted over three months ago on this page:

http://digg.com/links/Dan_Huard_is_digg_user_AlbertPacino#c858412

It looks like he just cut and pasted some text he already had.

By: Matt Hoffman

Matt Hoffman — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 13:18:10 +0000

ForeverGeek will rule the world(maybe).

By: PurpleMonkeyDishwasher

PurpleMonkeyDishwasher — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:51:48 +0000

Busted. Rose simply can’t deny the clearly scripted Diggs, so he didn’t even attempt it. He just used his Chewbacca defence (of how the system buried the stories and banned sites) whilst completely ignoring the original accusations of the scripted Diggs.

I doubt he’ll ever admit he’s been caught red handed. Unfortunately for him the wider media are now on to it, so its not going to die as easily as he’d like, despite his best efforts to kill it on Digg.

By: armin

armin — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:14:04 +0000

He (Kevin) strikes me as a quite arrogant guy who just got caught and doesn’t know how to explain himself becuase Digg doesn’t have a PR department.

By: anonymous.please

anonymous.please — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 08:50:08 +0000

I think it’s a mixture of manipulating and anti-spam techniques gone wrong. I agree that the automated digging with Kevin’s name in the middle is a very strong indicator, that something fishy was/is going on.

On the other hand, banning the url was not going to help digg, and would further fuel the story, that’s absolutely clear to everybody. So I am willing to believe that there was some automated mechanism in place to ban urls, when enough stories were buried (regarless whether that happened by manual manipulation or by democratic vote) in a row. Every spam-measure has a false-positive rate, and so you were unbanned, because it would have been just as as ridicuous to justify your banning, as it was to ban you in the first place.

I do agree, that the response is a non-response , and that they still have to clear some stuff up (that will hurt them in the short term, but will be the only way for them to not totally eff up in the long term).

By: david

david — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 07:50:48 +0000

i dont know why Kevin is complaining, his ass is getting richer because of us! people like you and i who sumit the stories, he doesnt do shit. if it wasent for us his website will be just like the rest. the website has become to corporate and too freaking complicated. if the storie is good, peole are going to digg it, if not, people are not going to digg it!

By: William Howardson

William Howardson — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 06:39:31 +0000

The Guardian newspaper just picked up the story:

http://www.digg.com/technology/The_Guardian_Newspaper_picks_up_the_Digg_Story

By: Brad

Brad — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 04:29:14 +0000

Whatever the outcome of this thing turns out to be, chances are digg users will pay a bit more attention to how the system they are using really works, which is a good thing. Kevin has built a career out of smart (and fairly shady) business/personal moves, not the most surprising being buring a story about censoring a supposedly user driven site to his own end. I don’t really use digg other then the few times friends have linked me to it for some reason, but whichever way you slice it, “there is no such thing as bad press” seems to be ringing in my ears today.

By: devnet

devnet — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 04:03:37 +0000

As stated previously…I am continuing to track this with full support for forevergeek…I have a collection of many links reporting on this and am updating it as they come in. If I’m missing any, please let me know. I’ll continue to collect this as ForeverGeek continues to be a thorn in diggs side.

http://linux-blog.org/index.php?/archives/134-The-Dirt-on-Suspicious-Digging-at-Digg.com.html

By: Matt C

Matt C — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 03:00:29 +0000

digg was pretty cool in it’s beginning, but since they’ve started suckling at the VC teat, it’s really gone downhill (starting with that lame ass “we’re unique, just like everyone else in this thing called web 2.0 by the hipster elite” redesign.) As I’ve stated a numerous amount of times, user-chosen content sounds nice, until you realize the users are fanboys at best and (more often than not) morons at worst.

I had a Live Bookmark for digg and one for FG in Firefox, and one of ‘em is now gone

By: Zach

Zach — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 02:59:35 +0000

I agree. I think the more an idea claims to be democratic, the larger the threshold for shady things to begin.

By: darkmoon

darkmoon — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 02:55:19 +0000

Yeah. Actually they are. Just read all the comments for those that moderate commented down most of the stories. They’re the same that call it a conspiracy theory and Digg can do no evil people.

I find it amusing that I played both sides and mentioned the VC angle from a professional entrepeneur standpoint, and people called me stupid and said Kevin can do what he wants, and blah blah blah.

What the morons don’t understand is that when you take VC money, you are in fact the VC’s bitch. If they tell you to jump, you jump. Not all VCs are like this, but this is also why many entrepeneurs tell all business startups that if you can make it on your own, do so. You answer to only yourself.

Why people don’t understand that “SIMPLE” part of business is beyond me. Common sense. Of course, most of them couldn’t spell, but I wasn’t going to go there.

One even swore at me on my post of the matter. I figure it’s some insecurities about something.

By: Mike Stickel

Mike Stickel — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 02:49:35 +0000

The problem is that there are people that will believe him. The Digg loyalists will stay by his side no matter what.

By: James

James — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 02:38:35 +0000

Having read Kevin’s response on the Digg blog, I’ve got to say that he’s full of shit. Does he think people are stupid enough to believe what he wrote?

By: William Howardson

William Howardson — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 02:25:14 +0000

I have seen all of this happen firsthand. Someone usually asks a question about it in the comments and they are modded down into oblivion. I have even had my previous account banned from digg when I started pointing out obvious manipulation. I believe that the system has been systematically manipulated from day one and now we have proof starting to break. Please do not back down from this, we need to fight the good fight and at least be vindicated for our suspicions of untowards going’s on at digg.com. Kevin Rose should be ashamed of himself but did anyone really think that he cared about his users at all? I think this is all about money and corporate sponsorship.

By: David

David — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 02:06:17 +0000

What I dont like about the whole thing are the people that read like one line, think they know all the facts, and start saying things like “Digg is good and can do no wrong” or that its a “Conspiracy Theory”.

I think the important thing is that if you were on Digg today, and witnessed first hand some of what went on, you’d know that the about page of Digg (especially #1) is a complete LIE.

I have to admit, I was a big Digg fan for a long time…but now I will be turning to other sources as often as I can.