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Extremist group tries to game Digg
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- chaosmachine 16y agoThat's nothing, you should see what rabid Erlang fans can do when they're bored.
- noahth 16y agopretty sure the headline here should say "Extremist group succeeds in gaming Digg"
- gscott 16y agoI am certain a left leaning group is doing the same thing. Think moveon.org (in a different medium). They just negate each others extreme views.
- elbrodeur 16y agoYou may be certain, but so far a year long undercover investigation has yet to prove there is an elite cabal of liberals desperately manipulating information in an attempt to skew towards their viewpoint. Or, perhaps, the feeling that conservative content is underrepresented is because of something more benign -- maybe more liberals visit Digg than conservatives?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- elbrodeur 16y agoI'm having trouble parsing this statement. Are you saying that Liberals, suspicious of something fishy, launch an investigation and are therefor the same as the people who are actively engaging in extremely unscrupulous and dishonest behavior? Also, I'm not sure what to make of: "Happens all of the time aka US Congress." Does AKA have a meaning other than "also known as" that I don't know about?
- astine 16y ago"but so far a year long undercover investigation has yet to prove there is an elite cabal of liberals desperately manipulating information in an attempt to skew towards their viewpoint." That's just because their better at it than the Cons. Cue music from the Twilight Zone....
- jerf 16y agoA yearlong investigation to uncover a voting ring on Digg isn't impressive, it's bloody incompetence. It shouldn't have taken more than a week, if that. I left Digg, gosh, three, four years ago now, because it was pretty obvious even then that Digg was basically just a collection of voting cabals of various levels of interconnectedness. People were writing articles about it and stuff. People were writing how-to articles, which channels on IRC and how to set up your own IRC-based rings. Talking about how a conservative group briefly has the upper hand is like observing which pig has briefly risen to the top of the muck pile. Don't worry, I'm sure counter-conservatives will be rallying behind this story to overpower them in another iteration of the endlessly-boring cycle and I look forward to reading about how it singlehandedly proves liberalism is a cabalistic conspiracy on a wide collection of right-leaning sites run by the sort of people who still think Digg votes matter.
- SoftwareMaven 16y agoNah, the "mainstream media" won't report the liberals doing it. ;) I think this would be the most interesting problem a social media site would have to solve once it got traction.
- Alex3917 16y agoI don't think they cancel each other out. Digg has an extremely conservative bias. Half the stories on the front page are basically "Global Warming Is A Hoax Because Jesus Wouldn't Let That Happen"
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- htsh 16y agoYeah as a user since 2007, it went noticeably conservative in the last year or so (which is when many of us moved to Reddit). And it's not just conservative leaning but really pointed partisan stuff. I hope they can figure out a way to solve this sort of thing going forward. And I'm curious if their choice of either digg/bury instead of upvote/downvote makes it easier to game. I believe it does, as these folks haven't been able to do the same with reddit. I'm not sure, but I believe a story is gone once it gets a certain number of "buries" whereas on reddit a story with a lot of downvotes can be easily resurrected by upvotes. (though I could be wrong about this?)
- JeffL 16y agoPeople tend to self-segregate in real life. It makes sense that it should happen on the Internet, too.
- htsh 16y agoAgreed, but I think this is a little beyond self-segration. If they just wanted to self-segregate, they'd find stories they agree with and digg them up, but extending that to also ruin other people's discussion is another thing. They are gathering with the explicit goal of drowning out other voices outside of their self-segregated group. Perhaps another reason reddit isn't as susceptible is that it allows for user-created subreddits where like-minded folks can form such hives.
- jackolas 16y agoFalse equivalence. Because there happen to be two parties in the US does not mean there have to be two groups trying to censor Digg. Also leftists could never agree to this shit, we're not organized (pun intended).
- jff 16y agoYou don't need organization to get leftist censorship, you just need a majority (which seems to be the case in most general forums or news sites). Then, a natural self-righteous knee-jerk on the part of every reader gets conservatively-oriented things voted/shouted down posthaste. Surely you've seen an instance on the Internet where somebody says something which may be purely sane and reasonable, only to be followed up by 30 posts of "GOD, WHAT AN IDIOT", "I hate rethuglicans!", and "See, this proves how stupid Americans are, go eat a cheeseburger and go to church!" Actually... I just realized that both sides tend to "prove" their points with lots of ad hominem. It's just that the ad hominem coming from liberals tends to be a touch better spelled; I think the smart conservatives quickly learn to keep their heads down, so only the dumb ones try to step out into the shit-storm.
- jbooth 16y agoSee, this is why people are stupid in this country. Obama: "I'm trying to fix healthcare" Republicans: "He's trying to kill your grandmother" Washington Post: "Obama, Republicans disagree over whether healthcare plan will mandate euthanasia"
- nate_meurer 16y agoThis is the most succinct summary of the healthcare debate I've seen.
- sdh 16y agoor "one of the many groups gaming digg has been caught"
- SkyMarshal 16y agoThis. Others game social media sites to drive traffic to sites that profit them. This is the first I've heard of people doing it for political reasons though.
- olefoo 16y agoHappens here too. If you've ever wondered how a certain austrian entrepreneur always manages to garner enough votes to put him on the front page even when the material doesn't support it...
- jodrellblank 16y agoNo, but I often wonder how a thinly veiled personal attack gets multiple upvotes.
- olefoo 16y agoIn this case, it's probably because I'm expressing a frustration that many people share. It's an unfortunate fact that the success of HN as a social news site has made the attention stream it can direct valuable enough to be a target of manipulation. That some people are engaging in this sort of manipulation is indubitable. That I vented my frustration with one of the more egregious examples is a breach of decorum for which I apologise.
- CoryMathews 16y agoWhy do you think so many apple article makes it to the front page? What do they get out of it?
- flatulent1 16y agoIt think that some of the articles with negative news about Apple (the ones making a fuss over fairly minor things), be be designed to cause ripples in the stock price. Things won't always be as obvious as MS-paid people trying to discredit Linux. Even rumors that aren't true may cause some reaction that can be exploited. I think there are many posts on many site for many topics that have ulterior motives. If you think of any situation where someone wishes to get or deny some kind of advantage, there's the potential for cyber-warfare. It can happen at any level, it can be powerful even when not fully understood. Look at kids driving other kids to suicide. Influencing people is power. Why do you think the diversity in ownership of U.S. broadcasters has become so eroded? There's more to it than lack of competition.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- elbrodeur 16y agoI think if you delve a little bit deeper, you'll find it might be a stretch to call these activities democratic. Falsely reporting and accusing users in an effort to squelch their viewpoints, for instance, may be normal for politicians but bears no resemblance to any honest democratic process.
- potatofish 16y agoAgree, that kind of specific behavior is really not cool. I think though the idea of trying to uplift or bury a story through organized voting is fine.
- anthonyb 16y agoVote up? Sure. Bury? No, since burying it in "record time" denies other people the opportunity to vote on it.
- culled 16y agoIt's been a few years since I've really used Digg but how does burying something prevent other people from voting on it? My impression was that once something is submitted it goes on the upcoming page where all the stories are presented chronologically and buries only affect whether it gets on the front page or not. Do things get removed from the upcoming page after a certain number of down-votes?
- anthonyb 16y agoI haven't used it for a while either, but I'm pretty sure that "bury" kills stories off completely. From their FAQ (http://about.digg.com/how http://about.digg.com/how): Bury. If you find stories with bad links, off-topic content, or duplicate entries, click “Bury.” That’s how we get the spam out of the system and let the good stuff rise to the top. Other than that, they're pretty sketchy on what exactly it does.
- potatofish 16y agoThat's nothing, you should see what Google does to conservative news. Google is a pretty big shill for the Democratic party, has a former exec in the West Wing, and has been caught repeatedly spiking stories in their news site that are critical of the left. Also not sure I'd call this an extremist group. Ideological group perhaps, but extremist? Sure some of the members cited were bad apples (stalking, etc.), but yeah this is pure ideological polemics. When you have the the majority of mainstream media shilling for the left, one can't really blame the right for trying to regain some ground.
- elbrodeur 16y agoSorry, could you cite where Google has been caught "spiking stories in their news site that are critical of the left"? I'm deeply interested in censorship and feel that this would be a pretty big story.
- OpieCunningham 16y agoWell, obviously it got buried by the Google/Digg/MSM liberal cabal.
- nnash 16y agoHow would it be a big story? Fox "spikes" stories that aren't even true, and are critical to the right every day. A lot of it ends up as fodder for the Daily Show.
- elbrodeur 16y agoBecause Google's job is to help you find what you are looking for, not provide you with an editorialized curation of information. Fox News, or any other major network for that matter, is not obligated to provide you with unedited information. Their express role is curation.
- chopsueyar 16y agoAre you specifically referring to the Taliban-trained monkey soldiers, motivated by bananas and peanuts? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buoVwM1pQEs&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buoVwM1pQEs&feature=relat...
- SHOwnsYou 16y agoIt doesn't take an extremist group to game digg. Before Digg went to their new format, I made a bot that upvoted or downvoted stories in C# in just a couple hours. I haven't dug around their new format yet, but I imagine it is equally easy to game too...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jcw 16y agoAnd the world becomes even more like some 80's cyberpunk novel.
- byrneseyeview 16y agoWhat they fail to understand is that there was never a conspiracy to censor their content, it was the greater Digg community that did that because their articles are usually unprofessional, fact-challenged fantasies that nobody wants to read. They should probably have asked a conservative. It's hard to tell whether these folks were submitting quality stories with a different slant, or were actively submitting crap. Obviously it's hard to trust the views of a site that says: There are a few differences of opinion within DP, although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective. They hate Obama. They hate progressives. They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it. They hate the secular nature of our nation. They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. They hate abortion rights. They hate public schools and really hate higher education. They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya. And follows that up with the unironic: They just love to hate. Fortunately, this article makes it easier for voting sites to detect cabals and manipulators by seeing which accounts vote in tandem. That might lead to false positives, but that may not be so bad--if only a tiny minority cares very strongly about a single story, I don't have to care whether or not they're coordinating their votes. Either way, it's likely to be of less interest to the average reader.
- gwern 16y ago> It's hard to tell whether these folks were submitting quality stories with a different slant, or were actively submitting crap. If I may quote from the article quoting the conspiracy's users about the submissions of 'these folks' > "If any of the usual suspects subbed a story claiming “sky blue/water wet,” I’d BURY IT without question. I’ve been on digg for almost 4 years… > -JeremiahLaments (account says Joined Digg on 21Aug2009)" > "I personally vote for a complete blackout on lib subs: Bury every comment (including the conservatives “helping” to pop the story). No up-votes (no matter how much you agree). > -asami21" > "Whether I agree with Bjornski, Anamaly100, PhilPerspective, Novenator, JanineWallace, UncaJoe, & a couple others I can’t think of right now, I bury `em anyway. ACTUALLY each of them has been “dead-on, balls-accurate” (an industry term) at least once in the past week or so, and it sort-of pains me to be dishonest by burying them anyway, but then I remember . . . I’m not up for re-election! > -BentheDog"
- arch_hunter 16y agoI may be completely off-base, but after reading the article and poking around a bit I got the impression that most in the DP group are youngish (under 21) and just wanting to be part of a secret society that does something 'useful.' Most of the conspiracy theory nuts I know (I know a couple) are just kids who something big to happen, and so they make up a conspiracy so that they can be part of it.
- angrycoder 16y agoThe fact that they named themselves the Digg Patriots should be funny to anyone who's played Metal Gear Solid 2.
- sliverstorm 16y agoHow much you want to bet this isn't just another part of the 'game', an example of the left-wing extremists attempting to combat the right-wing extremists?
- known 16y agoAre they different from Slashdot moderators?
- jackolas 16y agoScore: 5; Funny.
- flatulent1 16y agoWell Slashdot posts never get removed, just modded down (below the thresholds some users may read at, but they have a choice). The meta-moderation process should help catch abusive moderation and reduce the frequency of bad moderators getting mod points. Since the moderation system isn't for down-rating posts that one disagrees with, the system get still get flooded with well-tempered deliberate misinformation. Would MS pay people to post "I tried for days to get my Linux install to work right, but the buggy drivers made my screen flicker so much my dog had a seizure and died. I'm sticking with Windows forever!"? Fun for moderators...
- Raphael_Amiard 16y agoWait, you mean they didn't do a perl script to automate the downvoting ? With such a simple and regular downvoting scheme it shouldn't be very difficult. They must hate computers too
- todayiamme 16y agoThis is slightly off topic, but why do people do things like this? I don't understand why anyone would go to such lengths to do something like this. I just don't get it. I see people around me fighting over parking spaces. I see people holding conferences on how to fight over parking spaces (that guy is muscling in!). I see people do the same for roughly every damn topic in this world, and sometimes it gets really messy. Why? What's in it for them?
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoGaming digg? It's a game, they've got time for distractions. Digg is like a sandbox, it doesn't matter much, you can't get punched over the internet yet. Parking spaces? Because they want to park and people can be intimidated by violence into giving up a preferential space.
- MichaelSalib 16y agoI once knew a guy who trolled a high quality policy discussion forum. His beef was that his wife made him go to a church that had a bunch of liberals, who would regularly say stuff that would enrage him, but which he couldn't respond to. The only thing that made him feel better was to piss on liberals online. So one possible explanation is that some of these people feel frustrated and angry because for whatever reason, they're not able to voice their own political opinions in real life, so they get a rush from the power of denying random people on the internet that same freedom.
- flatulent1 16y agoFighting for parking spaces... you might be surprised how underhanded even that can get. The state of California has a rule in the vehicle code about abandoned cars. It's clearly intended to deal with cars people just walk away from (without intent of coming back), and perhaps some that are left in unsafe places (on the freeway etc.) The code mentions the court system addressing some aspects of it. The city of San Luis Obispo (known as being the first for banning smoking in public places and one of the first to have curbside recycling) came up with 72 hour abandonment. There are no 72 hour parking signs. But go on vacation, away to visit family, carpool or use your bike instead of driving, bed in bed with the flu for days... and a car left is in violation. They mark a tire and the street with chalk and leave a little "courtesy notice" under a windshield wiper and then at three days tow. Beside the high towing fees, and a substantial impound release fee, there is also a citation for abandonment ($280). Of course the towing contractors charge a hefty per day storage fee. They (the city police and parking agency) may reduce/rename the abandonment citation considering picking up the car from the towing yard to be "no intent to abandon". Of course some strapped for cash may not be able to get a car right away, and end up losing a vehicle due to the high ransom at the towing yard. The pirates may extract a lot of money for cargo ships, but on a personal level what the City of San Luis Obispo does to people hits harder as a percentage. Note that this practice happens even in from of ones own home, even if there is no parking shortage. Neighbors that don't get along use it as a way to harass each other, and in some places people call in complaints to tr and get parking spaces. As a college town, there are many places were units have no off-road parking, or insufficient off road parking. The city makes money on this, as do the towing contractors. They see to meet the public notice requirements without people noticing... I know of an employee who has bought dozens of vehicles at auction for the minimum bid (towing/storage fees). There's dirty business at every level it seems.
- s1rech 16y agowhat's the point of trying to "control" digg? Does it really make a difference for anybody? Did they call themselves the Digglluminati?
- lutorm 16y agoIs this an argument to not allow downvotes but only upvotes?