Subvert and Profit These guys pay people to digg sites at quite a nice rate. Personally I feel it is unethical, but would be interested in what others' think.
Agreed. When these and other similar sites are subverted to a large extent, they will become useless to their visitors, anyway. If you write a great article that digg readers are interested in, it'll get dugg. The way to gain attention is to create great content or tools and the attention will come naturally.
If they get sites to the top this will make digg less popular. Once this happens people will move on to next site. Sooner or latter someone do this to all sites like this. Maybe someone shuld tell digg about the site.
Digg definitely knows about these services. They've responded publicly and changed some features to try to compensate. But the whole basis of sites like that is user input, so if you control enough users you can influence the data.
yeah in theory, digg will fall when sites like this start to get bigger.. But if Digg dies, it will be a long, slow death. I can't see all of its users migrating to another better site overnight since Digg seems to be a culture just as much as a site. But $.50 a digg?? I wonder how much of a cut Subvert is taking on top of that..?
They charge $1. So they give you 50c to digg it and then they take 50c for themselves. I personally think it's a Great idea especially how they make money off other peoples websites. .
In public rating system there is a possibility of buying votes, it happens off line and now this is happening online as well. Richer people get richer, while middle class gets poorer.
I think I read (maybe on techcrunch?) that Digg has already successfully shut down a few "pay to digg" sites by tweaking their algorithm and banning users... i dont think that practice, however, will hold up in the long run
there are already bunch of crap sites making to Top of Digg. i gave up on digg now and no more follow them.
I don't think digg.com is ever going to die. The domain itself is awesome. Once you see it you never forget it. Plus the unique marketing of the word 'digg'. It'll be in the dictionary soon.. just watch.
This isn't going to honestly hurt dig. You could argue that it will be broken by the influence of the top people to push articles to the front page. This are usually just the beginning digs to get initial recognition for the article. I've never seen someone buy more than 50. Digg also monitors the forum (this one usually) pretty heavily, and they've banned people who posted the url of the article in the thread itself.