Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

ltgenpanda.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 51 posts

Re: Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

#41

Post by klbarry »

brandnewlow wrote: post #5

Author needs a detailed rundown of Diggs publishing partner program and how it works for this piece to be complete. Otherwise, this is great scoop. As someone who runs a bootstrapped, ramen profitable niche social news site, I have to chuckle at the irony. The Reddit founders have admitted publicly on many occasions that they used sock puppets to bootstrap a community on their site. Meanwhile is having to fire up Soc…

I'm interested in your experience with your social news site, and making it popular/profitable. Would you mind shooting me a link via email?

Re: Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

#42

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

jgrahamc wrote: post #34

I think the conclusion that Digg is behind this is tenuous. The evidence presented is: 1. When told about these accounts the activity on these accounts stopped. 2. The OP claims: "On a technical side: Digg can only ban accounts but cannot stop accounts from digging. So, if this was from some exterior group, digg would have only banned them as they cannot stop them from digging." 1 can easily be explained by recognizi…

While it's true that digg can do anything they want on their site, pragmatically speaking their development process may not support creating and deploying the change you're thinking of in a matter of minutes or hours.

An alternate explanation is that the bogus accounts are external, and digg blacklisted the IP's associated with those accounts upon learning of this. Most larger websites will have a fast way to blacklist IPs on their load balancers or the like simply to avoid buggy robots, spammers and trivial DoS attacks.

Re: Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

#44

Post by brandnewlow »

klbarry wrote: post #41
brandnewlow wrote: post #5

Author needs a detailed rundown of Diggs publishing partner program and how it works for this piece to be complete. Otherwise, this is great scoop. As someone who runs a bootstrapped, ramen profitable niche social news site, I have to chuckle at the irony. The Reddit founders have admitted publicly on many occasions that they used sock puppets to bootstrap a community on their site. Meanwhile is having to fire up Soc…

I'm interested in your experience with your social news site, and making it popular/profitable. Would you mind shooting me a link via email?

Check the profile. :)

Re: Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

#45

Post by metageek »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #42
jgrahamc wrote: post #34

I think the conclusion that Digg is behind this is tenuous. The evidence presented is: 1. When told about these accounts the activity on these accounts stopped. 2. The OP claims: "On a technical side: Digg can only ban accounts but cannot stop accounts from digging. So, if this was from some exterior group, digg would have only banned them as they cannot stop them from digging." 1 can easily be explained by recognizi…

While it's true that digg can do anything they want on their site, pragmatically speaking their development process may not support creating and deploying the change you're thinking of in a matter of minutes or hours. An alternate explanation is that the bogus accounts are external, and digg blacklisted the IP's associated with those accounts upon learning of this. Most larger websites will have a fast way to blackli…

Or they froze the accounts by changing the passwords (and maybe the email addresses, to prevent password recovery).

Re: Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

#46

Post by M1573RMU74710N »

HardyLeung wrote: post #26
mikeklaas wrote: post #19

It is extraordinarily odd to me that digg would create fake accounts to promote sites. This is a very inefficient (and public) way to tweak an algorithm that they have full control over. The only way this makes sense is if it was done by someone without access to the algorithm. Either an external voting ring, or someone in the company who isn't supposed to be doing this. Even that doesn't make much sense.

The explanation could be very simple. Obviously Digg's algorithm is extremely important to the company, and Digg had put together a long QA and approval process to ensure its integrity. A change to the algorithm may require 5 people to sign off, lots of analytics, gradual deployment, etc. In the meantime, they run into some problems with the ranking, and knowing their own algorithms, they chose to game it (or tweak i…

This is plausible, but here's the problem I have with that.

If you look at the data, these accounts are not digging only preferred publishers.

They are Digging mostly preferred publishers, but also occasionally random blog-spam. (ex buzzll.com)

If Digg was behind this, why Digg random blog-spam as well?

No, if Digg was behind this I expect that would either make the accounts realistic by simply taking what an average user Diggs and replicating it a few times, perhaps with only preferred publisher diggs.

Any first-year CS student could come up with a script to create plausible user names, at least better than those in question.

The Digg team is not the best, but I have slightly more faith in them than this.

What I think we have here is someone who figured out that in order to slip in diggs for blog-spam, they had to digg some "top stories".

Let's think about this for a moment.

Let's say you're writing a Digg spam-bot.

You know in order to make your account look good you need to Digg some top-stories.

The easiest way to do that is pick some stories you know will be top stories...stuff that's always on the front page...e.g. Digg preferred publishers.

Let's say you didn't do this.

In this instance, you'd have a bunch of accounts digging only the same small set of blog-spam.

They would stick out obviously as a set, and digging only the same small stories.

But, wait...

Now they are not digging only random small stories...they are Digging top stories...so now they are part of a huge set of "normal" users, and their digging patterns look more like a normal user.

I think what we have here is simply a spammer who found a hole in Digg's automated account detection.

Re: Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

#47

Post by M1573RMU74710N »

ergo98 wrote: post #35
mikeklaas wrote: post #19

It is extraordinarily odd to me that digg would create fake accounts to promote sites. This is a very inefficient (and public) way to tweak an algorithm that they have full control over. The only way this makes sense is if it was done by someone without access to the algorithm. Either an external voting ring, or someone in the company who isn't supposed to be doing this. Even that doesn't make much sense.

>It is extraordinarily odd to me that digg would create fake accounts to promote sites Agreed. The fact that it was primarily promoted publishing partners doesn't implicate Digg at all: Many of these spam accounts first seek to establish an algorithmic legacy by submitting and/or digging and promoting sites that they think will do well (see virtually every "Today I learned that Costco sells caskets/survival food kits…

Yes, this is precisely the theory I had as soon as I read the first several sentences.

If you look at the list of sites, you'll see there are spam sites in there (ex: buzzll.com) that have diggs from the suspected accounts.

If Digg is behind this, why digg random spam sites?

Also, as dumb as Digg is, I have faith they could do a little better than d42, d43, .... etc.

I think what we have here is a spammer testing ways of gaming the system, or proceeding with gaming the system.

Re: Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

#48

Post by M1573RMU74710N »

j_baker wrote: post #38
jacquesm wrote: post #7

When you own a site and you change it you are not gaming it, you are tweaking it. You don't actually have to game it, you own the thing. If digg wants to use their own batch of sockpuppets to influence the front page to their partners benefits they are free to do so, the responsibility, the upsides and the downsides are all theirs to take home. This is like saying google is 'gaming' the search results by having their…

So an external voting ring was created to submit and vote up articles that were created by digg's advertisers? Sorry, but I don't buy it. If digg was behind this, then their actions are unethical. It essentially amounts to treating advertisements as content. It's saying "hey, the community likes this" when the truth is "someone paid us a boatload of money for this". Granted, the sanctity of digg's voting system had b…

The voting ring is not only voting for Digg advertisers. There are a few blog-spam sites in there, and a few are CLEARLY spam (like buzzll.com).

It could be a voting ring that is also digging "top stories" to make their digg patterns appear more natural.

Re: Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

#49

Post by M1573RMU74710N »

jgrahamc wrote: post #31

It's possible to get the registration times for these accounts from the Digg API. I did that and they were registered in large blocks starting 10/16/2010 10:03:05 and ending 10/17/2010 13:37:59. The blocks (ordered by the registration time) have registrations averaging a few minutes apart with hours between blocks. IMHO these could easily have been generated manually. 10/16/2010 10:03:05-11:32:20 diggerzXX 10/16/2010…

Nice.

This brings up another question:

If Digg did indeed do this, why space out registration, as if to hide it (from themselves?).....or do it manually?

Could they not automate the process, and automate it in a way so as to do it all in one go?

This could be "plausible denial", but still it doesn't seem quite right imho.

Re: Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

#50

Post by M1573RMU74710N »

timmaah wrote: post #33
wardrox wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, that could just mean Digg spotted somebody else was gaming their system and they stopped it.

If that was the case, digg would have banned those accounts. The accounts were not banned, just the digging of stories stopped.

That's interesting, but it's nowhere near conclusive.

Digg just had a major update and are in a state of transition still, we have no idea what sort of banning, shadow-banning, temp-banning etc procedures are in place.

(unless you are a Digg employee, in which case please do share)

Post reply on HN