Digg.com Poison URL’s and Poison Accounts
Posted on August 17th, 2007by Michael Gray in Social Media
Recently I’ve been doing some testing and experimentation and have come to the conclusion that not only are there poison URL’s in the digg system but poison accounts as well.
I’ve written about the ochlocratic users at digg and domains or URL’s are auto buried. I’ve seen this happen with a few as 1 vote and stories that were submitted at 3AM EST.
However a new phenomenon I’ve seen and been experimenting on is the autobury on the user account level. The most extreme example of this occurred last week. I submitted a link to a viral video on a site, when the submission reached the most/upcoming page it was buried, before going popular. OK so some of you say wow big deal stories get buried all the time so that proves nothing. Someone else noticed the video posted it on their website with a link to the original page I submitted. I asked a friend to submit this page. What happened next is the story went popular getting over 400 diggs. The video went on the get 77,000+ views over the next few days, being one of the top 10 most viewed and most linked to for it’s category on youtube. The story and video was also featured on one of the very popular top tier gawker media blogs.
While the two stories that were submitted weren’t exactly 100% identical, the most important difference is the submitting account. This burying of stories based on the submitting account is a disturbing trend I’m seeing more and more evidence for.
So what am I going to do? Before I leave for SES I’ll kill all my digg.com cookies, release my IP with my cable company/ISP and turn off my router. When I come back from SES I’ll have a brand new IP and create a brand new account.
It will suck having to build up my friends list again, but it’s a better than the prospect of 100% of all my stories being buried and never going popular. If you’d like to be my digg friend for my new account drop me an email and I’ll be slowly adding people once I get back.
Popularity: 8% [?]
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August 17th, 2007 at 2:04 am
The exact same thing has been happening to me. After a few front pages the punishment came down.
The thing is for the stories I noticed getting buried I did absolutely nothing wrong, no digg begs, just good old natural votes.
Nothing gets past mid 30’s and gets pulled from upcoming in a few hours.
It’s time for an account funeral.
August 17th, 2007 at 4:58 am
search engine optimization most important think for every businessman website it gives you better result .
August 17th, 2007 at 5:19 am
That sucks! - It makes sense though.
If Digg kills an account, the user would know it right away and they could create a new account the next day. If they secretly penalize the account but not kill it, the user might never realize they have a penalty against them and might eventually give up out of frustration.
About how many lame submissions did it take you to realize that your account had gone sour?
August 17th, 2007 at 5:37 am
incredible!
I’d watch out for digg people among those “i want to be your friend” emails you’re soliciting!
daniel
August 17th, 2007 at 10:23 am
I started a new about a month ago.
The new account — with fewer friends, and less “history” — has a MUCH easier time making FP
August 17th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
That’s interesting - good to know information though. Thanks as always!
August 18th, 2007 at 1:00 am
What a fascinating article - thanks Michael.
August 19th, 2007 at 3:13 am
MG, perhaps you should keep your poison accounts around. Wouldn’t it be nice of you to “help out” your niche competitors by submitting their stories from one of those accounts before someone else has a chance to?
…not that you would ever do a thing like that.
August 20th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Interesting, wonder how you got their poison list.
August 23rd, 2007 at 2:54 am
Christ on a stick, would people PLEASE stop coming up with excuses to whine because some website didn’t link what they wanted to link? It seems that SEO websites, especially ones that aren’t that well known, do nothing but whine, whine, whine.
First I come across an article whining about a trivial error on a Wikipedia article that was corrected, now it’s whining about Digg improving its promotion and burying algorithms.
Digg weighting votes differently is a GOOD THING. It helps improve the quality of submissions, just like how weighting the ‘votes’ of web pages via PageRank improves search results. People with what the algorithm determines is a history of good submissions should have their vote count for more and so should their friends, who are likely to share similar tastes.
You say this makes it not a democratic system, but it still is. It allows for the status quo to change to anything–if a trend shows a dislike for a previously “high rated” user’s submissions, then their new submissions get weighted less.
This is not to mention the fact that it also reduces on spam (in a relaxed sense to include self-promotion of blogs) and low quality links.
And surprise, suprise, Digg won’t disclose their algorithms for the same reason that Google won’t disclose their own. Trade secrets.
Furthermore, you say that you’ve done empirical testing, but I haven’t seen the data. Please try to be at least partially scientific–this means a large sample size that is collected in a consistent (most likely automated) manner. Case studies, especially when it comes to something like this, are _completely_ worthless. Learn about statistical significance.
August 23rd, 2007 at 2:57 am
Oh yeah, I forgot to use the proper term–it’s all sour grapes.
P.S. Your captcha system sucks. It doesn’t even attempt to obscure how the characters are rendered. Even the crudest of the crude OCR could get past it. I don’t know why you wouldn’t use one of the numerous, open source and much better systems.
August 23rd, 2007 at 5:59 pm
You are 100% right about this Digg phenomenon…..who will bury digg….Its High time now!
August 25th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
“Interesting, wonder how you got their poison list.”
submit any article from prisonplanet dot com. poof.
September 15th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Bonus points for using the word ochlocratic.
September 25th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
So what do you think is getting you into this poison list? I still havent got a story to the FP and now its a quest.