News Source: http://humanorbot.com
Published: Sep 23, 2008 - 02:36 pm
Story Found By: LtDraper 1340 Days ago
Category: Social Media
28 Comments
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News Source: http://humanorbot.com
Published: Sep 23, 2008 - 02:36 pm
Story Found By: LtDraper 1340 Days ago
Category: Social Media
28 Comments
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I was just reading another story about Zaibatsu, a.k.a. Reg Saddler top digger banned and reaction from him and Digg management http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_digg_user_zaibatsu_banned.php. Don’t know how these issues will be solved, but we as ordinary participants of the soical media community hope see some positive moves for more fair ground of communication via social media.
We are not ordinary participants, we are marketers. Our view must be to find out how to exploit such systems to our advantage. This is after all a marketing forum, not a social hippy forum.
@lyndon - You’ve hit the nail on the head. Two of the major types of people using social media are 1) People using it because it’s fun and they want to better the community (the hippies), and 2) People looking to promote something (the marketers). The trick if you’re in the second group is to look like the first group. A lot of marketers on Digg have made the mistake of being a little too transparent in gaming the system, which leads to a revolt from the hippies.
I notice Kevin Rose is also listed as a blind digger.
@jeffquip - 6.6% for Kevin Rose? That doesn’t quite seem blind to me. And if you install the GM script he doesn’t show up in red as abusive. 94% for msaleem, on the other hand....
@jeffquipp - Ha, want to see the overseas digg admin that bans Mr. Kevin!-OT
It looks like there’s going to be a lot of pressure on Digg to ban some of the big blind Diggers or lose their credibility.
@tamar - perhaps you should read the article next to the table before desphinning? The statistics aren’t on your submissions, they measure the number of times in a sample of 1,000 Diggs that you dugg something in 20 seconds or less from your last digg. So what was innacurate about the article? It’s been interesting to watch how social media experts have been handling this story. It’s being buried heavily by people on the list, and voted up by everybody else.
The applications for Sphinn, pligg etc. are fascinating.
Also, this reminds me of a conversation on Sphinn where people mentioned reading stories a while before sphinning them, and thus being able to vote fast. The blind diggs measurement is useful, particularly in detecting potential bot patterns, but it needs to be recognized that it is limited by its assumption: people read immediately before voting. True probably 95% of the time, but not always.
@GabI agree that some people can read the article and then vote but that doesn’t seem to be what this table is focusing on. We define a Blind Digg as a vote for a story that has occurred within 20 seconds or less than a vote for another story. We sample the Diggers last 1,000 votes and calculate what percentage of them took place within 20 seconds of another vote. Even a speed reader can’t fully comprehend 3 stories per minute, so we think that’s a fair measure of whether someone is actually reading the stories.So for your senario to fit, they would have to read *all* their stories first and then vote for them all one after another. This is possible if you have all the tabs open and work in that order but it’s a little suspicious. Still, does it really matter though if they don’t read any of the material? Surely the key point is the contribution they make to the community. What’s wrong with assessing them not as news consumers but as news producers? What is the quality and quantity of their submissions like? As anyone who has investigated social media knows, the "social" side is significantly over-hyped. The vast majority of users are passive consumers, they will just visit the site to read the top rated articles. Only a single digit % will actually submit articles, comment and get deeply involved with the community. If Digg is going to kick out all their top news producers, they may soon find the model falls apart. As others have said, Mixx must be loving this situation, even gaining a handful of these power users would significantly boost the level of content on their platform.
digg has been banning diggers who blind vote for quite some time ... lets just say I have a friend with first hand experience ;-)if you keep using scripts or methods that get you banned without evolving and learning from your mistakes I dont know what to tell you
@LtDraper:Did it ever occur to you that people may be digging from the following pages:http://digg.comhttp://digg.com/all/upcoming/mostIn fact, I have personally vouched for these pages at the SMX event I spoke at. I also mentioned that I subscribe to many of the blogs represented on those upcoming pages. You know what that means -- it means I often already read the content beforehand. Thus, of course I’m going to vouch for said content. (What, you mean I should read these articles again?)Perhaps it’s heavily debated because it’s an unwarranted attack on people who are involved in the social media sphere. I’m not saying that everyone is innocent, but I am saying that there are plenty of people who want to paint community participants as in the wrong when they are only doing what normal community participants are doing: participating. And they’re doing so actively.I’m not commenting on the Zaibatsu banning. I’m not commenting on the banning of the other 80 so people (except to say that I only knew 2 of the people on the list). I am going to say, though, that it’s unfair to make out everyone on that list as a bad guy, and sadly, that’s what this list looks like it’s trying to achieve.As for the domain name, it’s still inaccurate: humanorbot.com. Do I look like a bot to you?Oh, and I read the "article" more than once. It still is singling me out as a "top Digger." That was my reason for Desphinning.
By the way, LtDraper, I’m curious to hear your comments on your site and its tools, like this: http://promote-my-site.com/index.php/component/option,com_pmsdiggmgr/Given your claims, it is relevant to the story submission, and I must say that I don’t know many people who create tools to manipulate Digg. There are very few people who possess that level of proficiency.
@tamar - Thanks for the link to our PMS Social Suite Product. Yes, we provide a tool that helps people take a structured approach to their promotions on Digg. If you’re not a Top Digger and want to promote your content, tools such as these are your only hope. And yes, we’re pretty proficient at looking through the Digg data to find things.The Digg API makes things fairly transparent to anyone that wants to take a look. For example: http://services.digg.com/user/tamar/diggs?appkey=http%3A%2F%2Fapidoc.digg.com&count=100 The date field is denominated in seconds. The diggs at 1222102305, 1222102304, 1222102302 show three stories from upcoming dugg in 3 seconds. While it’s believable that someone might have previously read a number of stories that then appear in upcoming or on the front page, a very high blind digging rate (such as your 92%) seems to suggest a different behavior. Upcoming is pretty much a firehose of submissions, so the odds that someone can consistently run across stories they’ve already read on the upcoming page stretches things a bit. It’s even more suspect when someone bounces between digging upcoming and popular stories in 1 second intervals, such as the diggs at 1222093823 and 1222093824 (The API shows the status at the time the event occurred). Combine that with a 94% rate of digging your 105 mutual friends, and one wonders how you’re able to pick your mutual friends off the upcoming pages so quickly. Looking at all of that data it’s understandable that others might wonder what is going on. Maybe you’re just a super-Digger, but given the number of people at the top showing suspect behaviors as well it’s clear there’s a bit of a problem here.You’re on the Top Digger list because Social Blade has you listed at #58. They’re sort of the Nielson Ratings for Diggers these days since Digg stopped publishing the list. The list is not saying all top diggers are blind diggers, it merely shows the statistics of the Top 1000 Diggers and lets people decide for themselves. There are certainly lots of Top Diggers shown who are not blind voting or voting only among their mutual friend list. But 617 of the Top 1000 are blind voting, and many of them vote mainly within their mutual friend groups, which suggests a quid pro quo.
Yup, back when I submitted regularly, I was #38. Now it’s #58 becasue I stopped caring. I wish other people would forget about it but this kind of coverage fuels the fire that in my humblest of opinions was already extinguished.In any event, it’s also been established that popular domains are on the front page of Digg. In other words, unknown domains don’t hit Digg’s front page, at least not as often. If you want to investigate the domains I digg, you’ll see that most of them actually meet the criteria that I spoke about. Still, I’m kind of bored of all this lame Digg coverage. I’m also finding that your PMS tool conflicts with the behavior you are trying to "out" with your other humanorbot.com domain. Maybe your $19.95 educational program actually stops your own subscribers from abusing Digg, but I find it hard to believe that your intentions are entirely benevolent. From what I hear, your few Digg accounts have been banned. Has it ever crossed your mind that there may be a reason for that?To that end, I should probably throw out a disclaimer warning that nobody should actually try the Greasemonkey script you linked to on your site. They may, after all, get banned too.I’ll note that I spoke with Jay Adelson in person last week at Web 2.0 Expo. Let me put it this way: he doesn’t want script usage of any kind on Digg.
Tamar, it’s obvious that scripts that automatically digg stories while you sleep are wrong, but can I use scripts that Digg the item from the story without going to Digg?Thanks.
Shameless self promotional spam is the word of the day. Ban Pro Diggers !!!
@anonym - you make a good point. According to Digg, ANY scripting is against their TOS. So if you use a Greasemonkey script to highlight comments, you’re in violation. Even programming your intelligent keyboard to click "share" with a function key is against their TOS. Pretty silly. You’re also in violation if you cooperate with other users such as sending an email, tweet, or IM asking for votes from your friends. Acting in concert with other users in any way is against the TOS. On the other hand, there’s no way for Digg to tell when your GM script isn’t sending them any information, such as with the script on humanorbot.com. It doesn’t have any interaction with the site. You shouldn’t run any script if you can’t look at the code and understand it. After all, GM scripts have all kinds of access to your private data.@tamar - You "heard" that we had accounts banned? Our blog post explaining that had been up for three hours when you made that comment. If getting your account banned is the end of the world then you’re really taking the wrong approach. Your strategy should be about establishing relationships that transcend a single site or account. And you shouldn’t trust a site to which you’d paid nothing with that data.
@ANOnym - well, this submission on Sphinn isn’t about digging while you sleep. :) Not really, at least.You bring up an interesting question. I would say that until about 3 weeks ago, Digg didn’t mind most scripts. Then, it was determined that Digg’s #1 user had abnormal activity -- he was digging too quickly. Old scripts, like Smart Digg button (see #12 here: http://www.techipedia.com/2007/digg-api-tools/) are still useful. Embedding a Digg badge is not a problem.However, I think Digg is trying to eliminate 2 things: - Users who are digging too quickly, because it upsets new users who think there’s a whole entourage of Diggers who do back scratching - Losing Digg’s own pageviews to scripts that have thus far bypassed it (and made Digg less appealing for acquisitions)I personally find the entire thing bothersome, since Digg is not just a random voting engine. It is a social site. To me, Digg is burying itself in its own grave. Things were good on Digg until September ’07. That’s exactly when things started going downhill. It’s only a matter of time, really.
@LtDraper: yes, I heard. I’m not talking about the blog post. I’m talking about some other accounts you owned. And in case my messages fell on deaf ears, my strategy dosn’t include Digg much these days.
From Digg’s point of view (and the POV of its user base), its all about the quality of the stories reaching the front page. If "top diggers" are gaming the system for the benefit of themselves and their friends, clearly this drags down the quality of the stories that reach the front page.Tamar, according to this site: you have dugg 153 articles per day over the past 30 day; 91.7% of diggs have been dugg within 20 seconds of each other; 95% of your diggs are classified as "friend diggs"; and 94% classified as "mutual diggs".Assuming these stats are legit, it looks pretty much like gaming to the system to me.If this is not gaming the system, how many additional articles are you reading per day that you don’t digg? In addition to the search forums that you monitor, thats seems like a lot of reading for one person to do every single day.
re: 94% classified as "mutual diggs"And that’s a bit of an inaccurate classification given the following question: how are they digging me if I’m not submitting?
@tamar - Mutual Diggs is the measurement of the percentage of a user’s diggs of the submissions of a mutual friend. It has nothing to do with the user’s submissions. Friend Diggs are the percentage of diggs of the submissions of a user’s friends. They’re measures of you’re digging activity, not the digging activity of your friends. So the fact that you’re not submitting doesn’t have anything to do with it.As for the other accounts that we own being banned, that’s news to me. Everything banned that we own is mentioned in the blog post. You might tell to your friends at Digg that they’ve hit the wrong person if they’ve really banned people thinking it was us.I agree on your point on the motivation of Digg being to make their page view counts more realistic. Thus our position that people shouldn’t use scripts and should concentrate on the analytical and structured approaches.@chris1 - As MrBabyMan said in the infamous podcast, he fully vets his friends and knows that he can vote for their stuff without reading it. I think that’s pretty much what most of the Top Diggers would say if confronted. Having the actual stats to look at puts that in a different perspective.
Fair enough. Again, I still find it annoying that Digg, a social site, performs in such a way -- it’s the gripe I had last year when I blogged about it a year ago yesterday. It’s also why I stopped caring for the most part. I suggest that you do the same. I’m not sure what gain you get out of this.
burn?
or as the digg kids call it, "PNW3D!!!!1!!11!!(one)11!!!!111!!!!"
Apparently I’m a blind digger because I used to be a top Digger. However, I only submitted 3 stories in the past 8 months. Desphunn as "inaccurate."