The War of Worlds Between Diggers and Bloggers and The Social Media Black Market

In my little experience with Digg, I have come to the conclusion that Diggers by default don’t like Bloggers. It is in many ways a war against worlds and it is an environment where Diggers have little to no tolerance when Bloggers enter into their territory for the purpose marketing and promoting blogger propaganda. While this may or may not be the reality of the situation, this indeed is my perception. What’s more is the fact that within all of the races of Bloggers, the MMO – make money online – race is the group that Diggers have the least tolerance for.

I can understand the anger Diggers have against Bloggers and in fact I have made an attempt to explain why Diggers Hate Bloggers in the past. Simply put, Diggers don’t appreciate Bloggers coming into their territory and using it as a method for mass promoting. Diggers feel the same way against Bloggers as mainstream society feels as if someone was dealing crack on the sidewalk in front of their house. Crack dealers are scum, hated and a virus of society that people take aim on eliminating. Diggers have the perception that Bloggers deal crack among the people within their group. It is a virus of society, or more so a virus of publication that they ulitimately don’t want to have bleed into their territory.

While I believe that there is a world of wars going on between Diggers and Bloggers, the same holds true internally for both groups. As many know, there is a war between Bloggers and I am discovering the same is true within many of the groups and clicks within Digg. While Diggers and Bloggers seem to be at odds with many things in this digital universe, there remains one thing that both worlds share a common ground. Diggers don’t like it when their system is used for the purpose of blog propaganda just as Bloggers shun other bloggers for publishing paid reivews.

Here is a story submitted in by Ted from TedsGame.com that talks about how he discovered that Diggers are accepting money to submit content into Digg. I find this all too interesting as Bloggers have their own the contraversial debates regarding using blogs for publishing paid or sponsored posts. The debate is a simple one really. Is it right or wrong to get paid to publish content on your blog that you’d normally not write about for free?

The reason why many bloggers feel publishing paid or sponsored posts is wrong is for the fact that some blogs carry more authority than others and their content ranks better in the search engines. The strategy is for advertisers is to use blogs with ranking authority to spread a message that normally wouldn’t spread naturally or organically in the search engines, thus the reason why advertisers are willing to pay someone for the publication. As it stands, the same problem is evident within Digg.com and among the group of top users within their community as explained in the article submitted in by Ted from TedsGame.com.

The Social Media Black Market

Written by Ted from TedsGame.com

The debate about the actual value of social media traffic has been almost exhausted. The conclusion: there is none, as some claim that it has some immediate marketing value, some claim the contrary. One thing is arguably valid: no matter how low the ratio between conversions and hits might be, a stampede of 100.000 digg users setting your server on fire can bring many benefits upon the page in question. Which brings me to my point:

A fair percentage of articles that hit the front page of digg are artificially boosted

As I was hitting a few months of active digging and the mark of 5000 diggs, I got to know a fair amount of top users of this site and became quite friendly with them, which doesn’t come as a surprise considering my beautiful, warm and charming personality. After a few very insightful IM conversations with a few of them, I wrote this post, where I mostly implied rather than pointed the fact that digg is gamed in a smashing proportion. Publicly I got buried and my initiative was frowned upon. In private, the guys I was talking about were fair enough to admit that I am somewhat right, but they don’t see much wrong in it. To those of you who would like to see a screenshot of the logged instant messaging conversations, I would be more than happy to provide proof. If somebody’s just curios about the prices on the digg black market, they go from $500 to $1000 for a front page, depending on the rank of the digger, the inherent quality of the article or the actual conversion value for the author. But things are worse than that, because

People get greedy

And when people get greedy, things get disgusting. I was lucky enough to capture one of those digg memorable moments, when an extremely high ranked user submits a fairly high quality article and hopes for the best. What the user in question did not know (or at least that was his official position when I directly questioned him) was that the site administrators noticed the submission, figured it will go popular and perhaps decided to make the best of it by resorting to a black tactic: they operated a redirect, a quite random one, for certain ip classes, from the actual page with the article to a page full of ads much resembling the promised content. If this isn’t clear, I will provide a quick “slideshow”:

Step 1:

The top user submits the otherwise good quality article from oddee.com

Step 2:

The perceptive internet marketer proves true entrepreneur spirit and proceeds with the redirect. I just happen to follow the digger’s submissions on regular bases so I’m right there when it happens. Instead of the promised 10 weird things in people’s stomachs we find erm, 10 rules to lose stomach fat, a sponsored link. The confidence I usually have in high-quality digg submissions was astonishing even to me, as I desperately tried to find my top 10 list from the submission’s title by clicking on the first ad. And I am the kind of guy that doesn’t click on ads. Sure enough, the article was nowhere to be found.

Step 3:

I was somewhat intrigued so I proceeded testing. I am located in Western Canada. As it turns out, my friend’s ip address from the same ISP as mine was showing the ad page, my friend from Eastern Canada had the normal article page and in Romania some where showing ads, some the article. So the redirect was not a full one, but nonetheless good enough to make a few bucks for oddee in case of a front page hit. So i went on and approached the said top user on IM. Please note that this guy knows all the mechanics of the internet, however, his response was the following quote: “serious? what is the purpose of that?”. The ads. What is the purpose of ads, he asked. Get it? He didn’t know why someone would just lay some ads on a page. Poor guy had no clue that ads will probably make money for the webmaster, so I explained to him that there is a thing called an ad and if people click it, the person that placed the ad there might earn some money. He seemed surprised again and I felt bad that I suspected such an innocent soul of having something to do with this.

Step 5:

I am sure that it was purely coincidental, but about 30 minutes after the aforementioned conversation, I tried my luck on that page again and, big surprise, the redirect was removed and the article was there. Get it? I am not saying that the said digger approached the oddee webmaster, I am still calling this a coincidence.

Just remember: top diggers do not game the site. Digg rocks and continues to be entirely user powered. Digg relies on such things as sheer quality and honesty. Gotta love digg and the top users.

For anyone interested, logs, screen shots and other information are available.

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