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Detailed How-To From Banned Digger
- alexandros 18y agoExtremely intresting article on how digg users have managed to bend the algorithm to their whims. I wonder if any social news site is really immune to this.
- tome 18y agoAny algorithm is going to end up being exploitable. It's an arms race, but like with evolution, it's the only way.
- ojbyrne 18y agoThe banning thing is dumb. http://digg.com/how http://digg.com/how: "Digg is democratizing digital media." Riiiight...
- kirubakaran 18y agoEven the best democratic governments of the world imprison individuals who they consider to be a "public disturbance" etc. And the definition of "public disturbance" usually has a pretty wide scope.
- ojbyrne 18y agoEven the worst democratic governments of the world have due process, the right to actually hear what the charges are, courts, etc.
- snorkel 18y agoAll that effort just to front page a story on a news site overrun by idiots. What sad, sad, waste of time.
- sachinag 18y agoLook, they do it for the high. That's a lot safer than pretty much any other addiction - gambling, drinks, drugs, WOW, whatever. At least he recognizes it for what it is. It's the same thing as we free speech zealots say about TV - if you don't like it, change the channel and let those who enjoy it have it. You don't like Digg? Fine. Then don't go there. (I'm sorry, but people getting all holier-than-thou about things as stupid as which social news site is better really gets on my nerves. Let's fight about something useful, like the Yankees signing Tex or something. :) )
- villageidiot 18y agoDifferent strokes for different folks. What's the point of anything, for that matter? ( - "Ask HN" question, perhaps)
- tectonic 18y agoWell, maybe. But my site http://absurdlycool.com http://absurdlycool.com didn't go anywhere for a year until I got it on the Digg frontpage (got all my friends to Digg it back when that worked) and then it took off and has stayed at 5k unique per day ever since. The value of that Digg frontpage to me has been many thousands of dollars in revenue at this point, and that PR resulted in a subsequent write up on TechCrunch, LifeHacker, etc.
- tectonic 18y agoSpeaking of which, feel free to Digg my variant on the above site. However, these days it's really hard to get on the Digg frontpage. http://tinyurl.com/7t2ydc http://tinyurl.com/7t2ydc :)
- ruslan 18y agoYes and no. There's a lot of moderation (by human beings) is now going on, nonetheless we got our stuff on digg frontpage thrice without any "extraterrestrial" help, just submitted links. Last time it happened in Nov/2008. Yet, it did not help much to grow visitors, in all the cases it just resulted in a spike and fall flat after that. Digg is totally useless as a promo service, same is true about Reddit, Stumbleupon & Co.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- jackowayed 18y agoif only there were a place where posting a story instantly puts it on the front page at least briefly, and where people actually vote for submissions because they're good, not just so that the submitter will reciprocate. It would be an added bonus if the comments weren't filled with mindless drivel. But that's clearly a utopia that could never exist.
- 0xdefec8 18y agoSounds a lot like politics. Just with more hotpockets and wizard capes.
- antiform 18y agoThis is a very insightful article, and I'm impressed with how much work the author put into getting something onto the front page of digg. If I were looking for somebody to do effective online PR, I'd be looking for somebody like this. I think it's somewhat sad that digg is so huge now that it takes so much effort to get people to pay attention to an interesting link, and I'd be interesting in seeing if there were any way to counteract the user fragmentation that occurs as a social news site gets popular. Reddit-like categories seem to be one solution, but it seems more like a band-aid than a total solution.
- mleonhard 18y agoI think it would be better to create a site that embraces the user fragmentation. I want to create a news aggregation site that provides a different set of articles for each user.
- lincolnq 18y agoI made one. :) http://newsbrane.com http://newsbrane.com Please send me feedback!
- mleonhard 18y agoYou won't get many users if you make them sign up.
- diN0bot 18y agosnap. hit me back if you want to work on this; i've got some things started but i'm open to collaboration (diN0bot@bilumi.org).
- eli_s 18y agoExcept that there are no interesting links on digg any more. It is close to 100% blog spam. Sites like this have to stay small to be useful - it's sad but the same thing will happen to HN if it gets too many readers. Luckily these type of sites are easy to set up so if HN ever goes bad an alternative will appear :) Personally I am completely baffled by people who think it's an achievement to increase their rank/karma etc.
- Prrometheus 18y ago>"I hope this article can help those normal diggers understand just how it is the power users got that way, and why digg is not a democracy" Actually, it sounds like Digg is exactly a democracy to me. You have as much chance making the front page of Digg (or a popular subreddit) as you do getting your preferred policies enacted by the government - essentially zero. Having your voice heard in a crowd of millions is hard. Those that succeed usually hack the system. The position that there is no conflict between competing interests in a democracy because "everybody has a voice" is BS (not that I would expect such arguments from this crowd). You can ask my sister who was outvoted for 18 years by my brother and I, the Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, or the Republicans in DC about how great a job democracy does of balancing competing interests.
- mixmax 18y agoI think it was Churchill that said that democracy is a terrible way to run a country, but it's the least terrible of the alternatives.
- Prrometheus 18y agoThere are certainly counter-examples to Churchill's thesis. While Singapore is technically a democracy, it has been under one-party rule for 50 years. In the early years of independence, the ruling party used its power to persecute its primary political opponent, the communist movement which was sweeping southeast Asia at the time. Now Singapore is a clean and prosperous state with a per capita GDP higher than the USA and three times higher than its neighboring countries. There are things to dislike about Singapore if you are accustomed to Western political liberties, but it is hard to say that it would be better off if it had followed the dictates of liberal western democracy, especially in the precarious early years. Chile is the most prosperous state in South America, although it was led to that point by a dictator that did horrible things to his political opponents. Iraqis had a higher standard of living under Saddam than they do under the current regime, though not if you opposed the government.
- daniel-cussen 18y ago
- nazgulnarsil 18y agoclassic example of how democracy turns into an in-group oligarchy. there is no way to engineer a democracy so that certain people will not wield disproportionate power. this is a problem, for government to be effective responsibility and power must be equal. since democracy always ultimately ties responsibility back to the masses there is no accountability. notice how in this example, just as with political democracy, power is wielded through framing what people vote on and not controlling the votes directly. the in-group does not actively prevent any story from reaching the top. but engineer the system in such a way that it is phenomenally unlikely for out-groups to get their content noticed, regardless of merit.
- d0mine 18y ago26,000 diggs in two months should have meant, $13k right </quote> It is about one digg per minute working full-time (8 hours a day) for two months straight! 26 000 / ((2 months) / ((24 hours) / (8 hours))) = 0.889820511 minutes^(-1) google calculator: http://is.gd/dnFp http://is.gd/dnFp
- gojomo 18y agoAlternate title: "How to win at World of Diggcraft"
- known 18y agoDemocracy != Meritocracy
- ntoshev 18y agoAre any of you guys practicing mutual upvoting with friends here, on Hacker News? I suppose it happens naturally to some extent. These voting patterns and the amount to which they happen naturally should be statistically visible for pg if he is actively looking for them.
- wesley 18y agoIf someone really wanted to, alot of this could be automated. Ofcourse, there probably already are such bots (unfortunately)
- eli_s 18y agowow what what a pathetic waste of time!
- Ardit20 18y agoI guess there is a lot to learn from this article which goes way beyond digg to the internet in general and maybe AI and also probably the genetic coding which we see happening and will see much more in the future. What this article tells me is rather simple and important. Programms do what they are told to do. There is no human element to reason nor decidions being made, it is simply fucntions, orders which are very very predictable. Knowledge is power of course and no one ought to have power which is why I believe that the author's cause seems noble, namely sharing your kowledge. But it really goes to the heart of the matter as far as the internet is concerned. Everything is a program and programms follow orders therefore every programm can be manipulated whether directly or inderectly to achive the desired maybe mal intentioned results. Hence will there ever be a proper democracy, a unity of people, a place where the market forces do not manipulate the good intentions of the users? Will there ever be a place where the people in general can share with each other deserving articles, unifluenced by other motivations or bias, but the simple desire to share worthy kowledge, I presume with the aim of advancing civilisation itself and educating felow human beings? The answer seems to lie not with the internet where robots (algorithms) follow orders but with the humans themselves who are imensly much more complex and driven by many varieties of purposes.