Since I fail to understand the concept behind “social media”, this article asserting “Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered” is entirely opaque to me, although I’m willing to accept that anything involving fReichtards, Talibangelicals and Banana Republicans acting in concert is guaranteed unseemly:
Digg.com is the powerhouse of social media websites. It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site. It reached one million users in 2007 and likely has more than tripled that by this point. Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”
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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.
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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.
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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 ring leader of the group is Bettverboten, who issues multiple digg and bury orders everyday. She is a Digg power user who has dugg 70,000 articles and has 1500 submits of her own (18% have gone popular) in one short year on the site. She was previously known as Lizbett before her lifetime ban for offensive and inappropriate comments, and has two sleeper accounts waiting if she gets banned again at loquaciouslola and MsBoop. She is also on Twitter, although her primary focus is Digg, where she has acquired a huge following of power users who are likely unaware that she is gaming the system, and even calling to bury some of her mutuals…
So I went to the Digg home page for the first time, and was told that they are “here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online… We’re committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing.”
To which I can only reply: How nice for you.
What does a writer / website garner from an advantageous ranking in Digg? More eyeballs? Advertising dollars? Bragging rights on Journolist? Is this yet another example of wingnut fvckuppery that I need to worry about, or are these “Patriots” just wannabe /b/tards throwing rocks at the ocean to influence the tides?
Fr33d0m
Yeah, the tides.
Guster
More eyeballs, more dollars, more ego.
And while I’m sure I hate that woman’s politics, isn’t she doing exactly what Digg is designed for?
James Hare
Well it was enough to get me to stop going to Digg and use Reddit instead — Digg often seems VERY right-wing because of these folks’ efforts. It’s another way of cranking up the echo chamber, with the added advantage of being able to silence your opponents. It’s a violation of Digg’s rules; however, that’s how the tools are used on any site.
Digg made some changes (as this article points out) to try and block this kind of behavior. I think it’s pretty telling actually. These folks pretend to love political speech (think Citizens United) but are more than willing to suppress speech they find objectionable EVEN IN A PUBLIC PLACE. Just goes to show you that their commitment to “freedom” is fairly limited.
What bothers me is that there are plenty of liberals who think turnabout in this case would be fair play. It’s not. If what these folks were doing is wrong and objectionable, it would be wrong for anyone to do it. Censoring your opponent’s views does nothing to make your views stronger. I’m all for banning disruptive posters, but I’ve always kind of liked that most liberal sites have a troll or two that stick around. Even if sometimes they really shit the bed, they are an acknowledgement that free speech matters, and that truly free speech means allowing objectionable material.
James Hare
@Guster:
They’re violating the terms of service by collaborating to collectively bury stories. That’s not allowed because it could be used by motivated folks to censor objectionable stories. It’s high-minded nonsense because that’s how these tools are used on every site that has them. Digg made the right choice in changing how folks can report stories so this kind of thing is less effective.
LGRooney
Alone no more!!!
Sorry, couldn’t get past that one little point. Although, I wouldn’t categorize it as a problem of opacity as much as pure lack of interest in the crowd.
victory
The entire concept of Digg is to promote (digg) or censor (bury) information brought to your attention by other participants.
What’s the problem?
James Hare
@victory:
Collaborating on burying stories is the problem. The terms of service are very clear on that.
middlewest
I feel like South Park covered this story already.
Butch
As far as failing to understand the concept of social media, me too. I don’t get it at all.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@LGRooney:
I’m with you folks. I have no interest in “social” media. I’m of the rather firm belief that at least 80% of our population is either borderline mentally disabled or completely fucked in the head. Why should I care what a mental defective thinks is interesting?
JGabriel
@Guster:
If they banned her account for life, I’m guessing that she wasn’t doing what the moderators thought Digg was designed for:
.
Cat Lady
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
Me three. Now get off my lawn!
Billy K
So, in other words, you want to know how the internet works?
JGabriel
Umm, I’m not a big follower of most social networks. The content generally lacks enough depth to meet even my non-stringent standards.
That said, it’s kind of amusing to read all these complaints dispararging social networks from people socializing on an Internet blog.
“BUT THAT’S DIFFERENT!”
Oh. Okay.
.
ChrisS
I used to visit fark.com a lot back in the olden days and then after ~2002 it started being overrun with rightwing trolls dominating the comments on the newslinks by sheer volume. You would post a comments and the winger would post 10 and continue until your exhaustion. I find it hard to believe that there is a group of RW trolls typing away in some non-descript Silver Spring office building maintaining a near ubiquitous presence on major media sites. Some, sure, and I hope the democrats know enough to have their own paid posters, but I think that there’s a fair share of people that just like an internet argument and are glibterians with lots of free time.
But it’s funny how much they all spout the same nonsense and showup en-masse once a website gets big enough.
Comrade Darkness
Funny, I thought digg was really useful for a month or so, then everything it recommended started being just random garbage so I bailed on it.
The internet lets some people cling to high school prom queen voting again and again, I guess.
Leonard Stiltskin
The concept is not hard to understand. Users rank stories that interest them, the most popular go to the front page.
What these users were doing was killing stories that did not support the conservative agenda.
You see, in the wingnut world, anything they don’t agree with should be censored. Those that engage in this type of unconstitutional behavior typically, as in this case, call themselves patriots.
BR
During the 2007/2008 primary and election season Jed (of dkos, of Jed Report back then) and I took over the front page of digg with his videos and our posts. We sort of had a system: he’d get a post / video up, then I’d spread the word on a number of forums including mybo and would get the post past the threshold diggs needed to be on the “top in upcoming” list, at which point random folks who had me on their fan list would take us over the top.
It was fun pushing lots of pro-Obama anti-McCain/Palin stuff on digg, but the freepers eventually figured it out and found our posts and buried them, decreasing the effectiveness of the technique.
Remember November
it is akin to BP burying negative stories on Google. It’s still there you just need to wade through the company spin. They rely on most peoples laziness not to dig.
arguingwithsignposts
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
says the pseudonym who is participating in social media with this comment. A blog with comments *is* “social media.”
ETA: I see @JGabriel beat me to it.
LGRooney
@JGabriel: I think we are more filtered here in that we will generally speak when we feel we have something worthwhile to say rather than just spouting off because it’s been 15 minutes since I last told the world the color of my snot or gave my opinion on whatever inane topic is dominating mass attention.
Yes, it is a snob thing.
arguingwithsignposts
@LGRooney:
You’re not from around here, are you? :)
ajr22
Reddit is a far better site than Digg. This stuff is nothing like /b/, they do way more than downvote stuff, if it was them they would probably shut down the website somehow. Plus they would probably send users they don’t like 20 boxes of pizza.
JGabriel
LGRooney:
I think you mean “self-selective” not “filtered”.
That said, the “snob thing” concedes my point. We’re not against social media; we’re just the TV equivalent of IFC and PBS complaining about Fox and ABC.
.
Alex S.
@ChrisS:
Oh, I am sure there is a group like that, or groups, paid by Norquist or Gingrich, that does exactly that. I remember how “someone” manipulated intrade.com throughout the 2008 presidential election to give McCain a higher chance of winning. And there are highly dubious polling outfits out there (they exist on the left side, too, Research2000, but that doesn’t make it better, it only makes it more likely).
And for some reason, every first comment of a HuffingtonPost politics article is a right winger, as if they keep waiting for new articles to appear and to get the highest visibility.
And for some reason, every liberal site contains at least one right wing troll, and those are relatively active as well. And I would not want to spend my time always arguing against the viewpoint of the author, and always having the whole commentariat against me, unless i was paid.
The Washington Post and Politico comments are especially toxic – because they represent the “public opinion” for beltway media types who turn this opinion into the “conventional wisdom”.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@arguingwithsignposts:
Fine. I’ll amend my comment.
I prefer anti-social media.
That Other Mike
Wannabes is right. /b/tards could eat this lot for breakfast; how do you think teh m00tle got voted most influential person of 2008?
JGabriel
@Comrade Darkness:
Yep, I never got into Digg (and similar aggregators) for just that reason: they’re too random. It’s like “Hot or Not” for internet memes.
.
JGabriel
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
Heh. I can relate to that.
.
catclub
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: “Why should I care what a mental defective thinks is interesting? ”
Um, … you do know there are lots of postings here, with lots of comments, on what the Washington Post has to say?
A mental defective with either a printing press or an army needs to be watched very carefully.
fucen tarmal
let the conservatards try and hold the ocean back with a broom. they screw up digg, people quit it, they are talking to themselves once again….unless you are invested in it financially, who cares?
another site will spring up, or 5 sites, that don’t have that problem…i like the idea of tards chasing rabbits on the internet…
Origuy
But, but, JournoList!
I haven’t done anything with Digg, Reddit, or any of those. I don’t Like things to Facebook outside of Facebook, either.
I don’t have a lawn, but if I did, get off it!
Bubblegum Tate
More eyeballs, yeah. I know a good number of web-based companies–including the one I work far–are increasingly looking to social media–including Digg–to drive traffic. Our higher-ups get all excited when a story of ours gets dug because that alone can easily add several thousand more clicks to a story’s traffic numbers.
Fortunately, we’re a non-political site, so these little reindeer games have nothing to do with us, though I’m sure all it takes is one pro-Obama comment and/or anti-GOP comment for us to get labelled as part of the evil, insidious, bias LIEbrul media.
mcd410x
@Billy K: lol. awesome.
demimondian
Two words: puke funnel.
To the extent that Digg ranking is treated as a thermometer of what is hot in the political sphere, manipulating a Digg ranking is a simple way to raise the apparent significance of a zombie lie.
eyepaddle
Is/was Digg really that influential? I never even bothered to figure out what the hell it was, same thing for reddit.
I always just assumed that since right wingers ALWAYS parrot what their leaders say they didn’t need help in figuring out what the story of the day they were going to shill for was.
I never heard anybody make reference to learning things from Digg reccomendations–have I been missing out?
Woodrowfan
Apparently some people use Digg as a news reader, to find stories they would otherwise miss. The wingtards want to make sure that such people only see whatever Faux News Approved stories appear, so they bury anything that they think is “liberal.”
They do the same thing on Yahoo…..
mclaren
Digg and Reddit aren’t social media, they’re just news aggregators. Like Theweblist.com or any of a bunch of other sites that collect the day’s most interesting/amusing/startling stories. Fark.com does the same thing but for bizarre news articles. Boingboing.net does the same thing but for quirky/nerdy/science-fictiony stories, slashdot.com does the same thing but for linuxy/geeky/sciencey stories, and so on. There are lots of different flavors, but it all boils down to the same thing — people submit articles, everyone votes on ’em, and the most popular stories percolate up to the first page.
Real social media are things like delicio.us, which is a whole different deal.
Digg is just a news aggregator site where instead of having an editor, they use everyone’s vote to pick the stories.
And there’s nothing special about the first page. I regularly skim the first page and go to pages 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., same deal with Reddit and slashdot and the rest. Page one means nothing. Plus, there are so many news aggregator sites now that gaming one of ’em means noting because the story breaks out in a dozen other sites.
lawnorder
It can bring 1.5 million views to your site. More importantly, by “burying” the articles in digg they hopped (and might have had some success) to prevent the spread of liberal ideas to voters.
It is the same on Wikipedia. Articles are scrubbed of anything against their message. Valerie Plame’s article now is a watered down bio claiming “no harm has come of the leak of her name”. How can any Wikipedia writer know that for a fact is a mystery.
To me it just proves that social media information sites like Digg and Wikipedia are failed experiments. they are awesome if people are honest but pretty soon several gangs learn how to game their system and instead of a collective unbiased information you get the bland pap that survived the various posses wars of the “initiate”.
Was a naive idea to assume all would be ethical in using social filtering.
Aet
Why not? Cheapest think-tank investment ever.
Hire a few dozen/hundred young republicans straight out of school, or still in school, as contractors for $5 an hour. Let them work from home, pay one or two True Believers to keep them busy and producing.
I bet you could even get interns to do it for free.
It’s even cheaper than political donations and requires a lot less paperwork. It probably happens a lot more then we think.
JGabriel
Aet:
Sigh. And to think I’m still waiting on my Soros check, GODDAM IT!
I shoulda signed up with the conservatives. Why, oh why, before my birth, did I get in that line that said “Shred of Morals”?
.
Smedley
@JGabriel:
What he said!
R-Jud
@Bubblegum Tate:
It’s not just about eyeballs going to your site: Digg and other aggregators can influence Google rankings. If enough people link to, and then click on, a negative story about you or your firm, that story can be pushed to the front page of your search engine results.
lawnorder
I don’t think you even need to pay people, they love to proselitize their message, witness the forwarded right wing emails that make the rounds..
Like tacking a magnetic yellow ribbon on your SUV, to go online for a few minutes and “fight liburals” is a time honored tradition of the right wing. Can do it while bored watching NASCAR reruns and feel all powerful and important for “battling” Obama’s army of liberals. They love it so much that they would pay to do that (and some do, sending money to any tea party candidate who mails them).
Normally all that fun battling would just go to Free Republic or Redstate, unless someone finds a way to harness that energy and guide them on how to fuck up liberals more efficiently, which is apparently what this digg posse leaders did.
Digg, tumblr and Wikipedia all work in the “one person one vote” idea that each person has equal representation on their site. When people vote as a block, their block vote has a lot more power than individuals reading and recommending sites.
Social info filtering sites are failing. There is no way to prevent the sites from being gamed by well coordinated attacks from people bent on pushing their agenda.
Once again what we liberals did occasionally as a joke – google bombing Bush “miserable failure” – has been co-opted by the right to do a lot more than just get laughs.
suzanne
All I can think about this… doesn’t she have anything else to DO all damn day?
Holy SHIT. I mean, I’m at home, barefoot and pregnant, and there’s about 8,000 things pressing more on my time that this shit.
Oh, and my snot is orange.
arguingwithsignposts
@mclaren:
you, sir, are an idiot. They allow comments, sharing, etc. How is that *not* social media?
Loneoak
Speaking of social media nonsense, my grant-writer FB friends have been posting this charming site: What the f*uck is my social media strategy?
Bender
@fucen tarmal:
Lefty “Diggbats” have been doing same for years. Hot Air occasionally posts the Digg summary of all their pages which have been buried by Proggtrolls as “spam.” So both sides have people with excess time on their hands…
And do we have to explain to these journoTards (well, AlterNet… whose motto should be “What did you expect?”) what “censorship” really is? Hint: It doesn’t include up- and down-voting…
jcricket
Have you read the comment sections at any major newspaper site? If you do, you’d believe the world was just full (90%) of right-wing assholes.
I stopped reading anything in the Seattle Times comment section, because despite being an overwhelmingly Democratic state, and even most “Republican” voters being moderates, nearly 100% of the comments were racist, homophobic, anti-liberal, xenophobic, sexist, etc.
Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s most of the Internet (distance and anonymity make people brave). But if anyone thinks that’s a representation of the readership or of WA state, they’re on crack.
Same for sites like Digg. I don’t need my news aggregated any more than it already is. And if I do want to be pointed to links, I’ll read a blog of someone who’s not a complete moron (present company included).
MeDrewNotYou
@That Other Mike:
Amen /b/rother. And despite the rampant racism and sexism there, /b/tards are more equal opportunity haters anyways. Its all shock value, however stupid and immature that may seem, and I seriously doubt that more than a small percentage of Anonymous actually relishes it.
Athenae
I have no objection to the concept of Digg and Reddit and whatever else, I just don’t make the time for it personally. If I’d started there way back in the days of the political Internet’s birth, I might love it.
What I don’t like are the pronouncements that such sites are inherently democratic and open and free, man, they’re like, so pure, and stuff, because every system is vulnerable to gaming.
Going all the way back to 2004 there were rumors the Bush campaign was paying trolls to disrupt conversations on lefty blogs, and at the time the reaction was “what a waste of fucking money.” I look at this Digg thing the same way: What a goddamn waste of time. But hey, whatever turns your crank. I don’t think this stuff influences the political world the way many bloggers think/hope it does.
Shit, half the time my Test Republican friends and relatives, who I’ll run a meme past to see if it’s filtered down to Actual Voter level, have no idea what the wingnuts are on about. My mom had no idea there was a war on Christmas and when I told her about it, all she said was, “These people need something to do.”
A.
ed drone
@Aet:
Well it certainly will now, blabbermouth! You just told them how to do it!
Ed
JGabriel
@suzanne:
Stop snorting the Tang(tm).
.
burnspbesq
OT, but it appears that TBogg has hijacked Jeffrey Goldberg’s page at the Atlantic.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/conde-nast-at-ground-zero-an-affront-to-all-patriotic-americans/61055/
Either that, or Goldberg has a previously undetected talent for snark.
scarshapedstar
I guess so, given that Digg is just a safe-for-work wannabe /b/.
Btw, rules 1 and 2 lolololol summerfag.
Origuy
@burnspbesq: Bringing back on topic, I went to Goldberg’s page (well done snark, BTW) and tried to Digg it. Since I don’t have a Digg account, it sent me to a registration page. But this one said that they aren’t accepting new accounts. I wonder if there’s a connection to the original topic? It says, “The New Digg is Coming”, but why would they need to suspend registration for a facelift?
Nutella
@ChrisS:
Lots of free time since they’re living on Social Security, I expect.
Nutella
@Alex S.:
They’ve probably written a program to alert them automatically when a post goes up.
Catsy
To offer some perspective on the effect of Digg and similar sites, a personal anecdote.
I post my Lego creations on my Flickr photostream, which up until a few months ago was averaging a modest but respectable 300-400 aggregate views per day. The average number of cumulative views each photo had was somewhere between 100 and 300. The really popular photos might have between 500 and 800 views, thereabouts.
On May 27th, I posted a build of the Citadel from Mass Effect. Over the span of the next two days it accumulated around 800 views. On May 29th it was posted on Reddit (which is the same kind of site as Digg), and on the 31st, it was picked up on Kotaku, which is a news/aggregator site for gaming. The result of this? The linked photo of the Citadel build has over 17,000 cumulative views, and the average daily views on my photostream have increased by (literally) an order of magnitude and stayed that way.
Ultimately what makes getting picked up on Digg and similar sites desirable is very simple: visibility. If you are posting something on the internet, presumably you want people to see it. If what you are posting is creative, it makes your stuff more popular. If what you are posting has an agenda, then having it get upvoted on Digg raises its visibility and exposes more people to your argument; correspondingly the downvotes make it less visible and reduce the impact of your argument.
What these people were doing was very smart–but also very unethical and scummy, and quite blatantly against the site rules. And now that their usernames are out there, it would be trivial for Digg admins to examine their activity history to refute or validate their participation in TOS violations. I’d be surprised if many of those accounts remained active for much longer, and I’m glad to hear Digg is making changes to the voting mechanics to make it harder to game the system like this.
Joel
I have never used Digg, and am glad for it.
K2isnothome
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: Here, here.
K2isnothome
@Bender: It takes only one mention of “conservatards” to get you on the case!
MeDrewNotYou
@scarshapedstar:
Oldfag here. I’ve always read the first two rules as only applying during hostile actions or whenever attention could be harmful. Here at BJ, for example, there are already a few of us and most everyone else already knows about the board.
Most people who conceivably would know already do know about them. Casual references are okay as long as they don’t bring undue attention and newfags/cancer. I can see the value of absolute silence, but ISTM unrealistic to be totally secret.
scarshapedstar
@MeDrewNotYou:
I shoulda thrown in a [sarcasm]. I DUN GOOFED!
MeDrewNotYou
@scarshapedstar: Bet you can’t even triforce. ;)
(Even if WP would let you do it, I’m on a laptop, so I have an excuse!)
Slippy
@lawnorder:
I just went and looked at Plame’s entry on Wikipedia.
I do not see what you’re talking about at all. In fact, it contains a very detailed account of what happened with multiple references.
Are you sure you weren’t on Conservapedia?
scarshapedstar
AmIdoinitrite?
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MeDrewNotYou
@scarshapedstar: Full of win! I’mma’ copy pasta that for the part that looks uncannily like 8-bit Link.
plasticgoat
I think it is a generational thing. I am in my 50’s and don’t use much social media, but my kids who are in high school and college are all over it. They say it is a big damn deal.
Hippie Killer
I honestly don’t know what is more annoying. Social media, or people bitching about how they don’t “get” social media. What is there to get?
JC
Since I fail to understand the concept behind “social media”
Then why the fuck would you write this article?
Censoring Digg by hiding the articles is a fairly evil way to suppress progressive and liberal fact based rebuttal of the constant hypocrisy and lies of the republican party.
So if you don’t understand why not just link to someone that does?
Seriously, you are a fucking idiot.
It comes down to conservatives preventing liberal stories from making the first page. It’s like making the first google query only return conservative results. Most people don’t go to page 2.
Now, you’ve been informed, you still won’t understand, and you are still a fucking idiot.
JGabriel
scarshapedstar:
Errr … umm …
(squints at post again …)
Well, since I can’t make out what the fuck that’s supposed to be, I’m guessing “No.”
.
JGabriel
JC:
Aww, someone had too much caffeine this afternoon.
.
Equal Opportunity Cynic
@JGabriel:
WINNER!
maus
@Alex S.:
HuffPo and Salon both refuse to ban the worst right-wing trolls, their comment threads start off horrible and end up even worse.
maus
Usually it’s just gamed to get ad impressions, therefore $.
The conservatives, OTOH seem to be breaking the TOS to game the site, but not for profit.
lawnorder
Probably.. in this case I foolishly believed a kos troll.
But I’ve seen plenty of examples of Wikipedia watering down controversy. Their problem is the same as Digg or Youtube, a well intentioned community service can be easily ruined and gamed by a posse of people with no scruples.
scarshapedstar
@lawnorder:
“Some argue that their problem is the same as Digg or Youtube, a well intentioned community service can be easily ruined and gamed by a posse of people with no scruples.”
Fixed! (LINK NSFW)
Zach
My only real foray into diggifying something was for a website I made that literally regurgitated financial tables from the Tax Policy Center into a friendlier format… that jumped up to #1 on Digg and got a hundred thousand hits or something before being buried as inaccurate in a couple hours. So yeah, this exists and actually affects people. I had no clue it was accomplished by folks taking orders, though. Had I had the foresight to put up ads I suppose it would’ve cost a couple bucks.