Playing Digg Dug

A fascinating Alternet article on the news aggregate site Digg:  turns out there's a dedicated group of wingers on Digg whose only goal is to downvote and bury as many progressive stories as they can, and they've been doing it for over a year now.

The concept behind the site is simple. Submitted webpages (news, videos, or images) can be voted up (digging) or down (burying) by each user, sort of a democracy in the internet model. If an article gets enough diggs, it leaves the upcoming section and reaches the front page where most users spend their time, and can generate thousands of page views.

This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction. This was evident with the daily spamming of the upcoming Political section with white supremacist material from the British National Party (articles which rarely reached the front page). The inverse of this effect is more devastating however. Bury brigades could effectively remove stories from the upcoming sections by collectively burying them.

One bury brigade in particular is a conservative group that has become so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours, regardless of subject material. Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content). This group is known as the Digg “Patriots”.

The Digg Patriots would regularly manipulate the Digg community voting system in order to flush any progressive or pro-Obama articles off the site with multiple accounts, mass voting, submitting their own articles and pushing them to the top, etc.  The article details a massive campaign to turn Digg as conservative as possible in order to give the impression that the Digg community was far more right-wing than it actually was.

From both a social and technical perspective it's a pretty fascinating read, and just another reminder that if a system can be manipulated, it will be. They knew how to game it and did it for over a year.

Food for thought.