Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?
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They've created a monster and are trying to control it by cheating.

You would think that they could have come up with more creative names than ddX and such... If you are going to create shills, at least come up with some better names and change up some of the account creating dates and such. No wonder they are having such problems as a business.

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 Sock puppets to survive after raising $40 MM. Ouch.

Also funny, the article says Kevin rose posts were only getting 30 diggs these days. Were we getting a glimpse behind the curtain of the true size of Diggs active community there? To put it perspective, Windy Citizen does about 70-100k visits/month. Our hottest stories each week will crack 20-25 votes.

This is like saying google is 'gaming' the search results by having their people influence the rankings / search result pages by changing things in a way that benefits google.

What would be more surprising is if digg would not try to modify the homepage to benefit themselves and their partners (assuming all these parties are in fact digg partners, for which I see no proof). They're a commercial entity, I do not have high expectations that digg would do what they could to make a fair rendering of what their audience thought was best.

Digg has been gamed beyond the point of recovery by voting rings and 'power diggers', to see the people behind digg join in the fray is absolutely no surprise to me.

Other sites call it editorial control, on HN stuff gets banned, or flagged. No algorithm has ever been able to survive in the wild without some form of human supervision anyway, in that sense digg is no different.

Whatever the motivation for the changes I hope they'll succeed in getting the runaway train under control and to get rid of the feeling that digg is being run by a couple of individuals gaming the system but if their main 'tweak' is to join in the game in a way that makes them look like a voting ring then I doubt that will be the case, and digg will lose visitors faster than they did up to now.

An alternative (and simpler) explanation for all this data that the author uncovered is that this is just a real (external) voting ring on Digg, possibly one that is for rent, which happens to benefit those parties that are already using digg for promotional purposes. Maybe digg turned a blind eye to this happening.

Bottom line is it is their site, and they can run it any way they want to including the boosting of stories they think ought to be boosted. That's not going to work as a long term strategy, but their 'publishing partners' may find it worth enough money that digg comes out ahead. It would appear to be a 'slash-and-burn' strategy though.

The individual profiles I looked at all have large numbers of diggs and no comments or submissions, so a voting ring for sure, now it needs to be figured out who runs it, and if it is the digg people they should explain the purpose of this in this way rather than in a more direct one.

Time will tell.

I don't use Digg, I haven't for years, because it was too heavily gamed and not enjoyable to use anymore.

Your comment about Google though, they have to keep the trust of the users and the web as a whole. If they were to game their system for their own gain (that is artificially influence results to improve their own standings) and people found out or could prove it, Google would be in trouble. I am not saying they don't or haven't, just that with Google the trust is important because people have more at stake than on Digg, a lot have their lively hoods tied to it.