Digg spamming on a grand scale

For years we have all been trying to manipulate various search engines to make money. With the launch of web 2.0 and social networking a lot of sites are getting huge amounts of free promotion simply because other web users like the sites and their content and tag/digg them.

In view of the high value that a front page digg or delicious listing has (maybe $500 - $1000 just considering the backlinks) its surprising that nobody has started to spam these sites on a large scale.

Somebody could set up a network of a couple of hundred people who are already users of these sites and send out an group email every few days with a few sites to digg/tag. As long as the content of the sites was good then it would be very hard to spot. You could charge $500 for the service and pay your diggers $1 per digg and keep the profits.

I'm not thinking of doing this as I don't have the time and its not really my sort of thing but it would be interesting to hear thoughts on why nobody has done this yet?

 

DIGGers are pretty good at weeding-out the spam.

 

I agree but if you submit a good article and 300 of your fellow digg spammers digg it then how could digg weed that out? Obviously if you submit rubbish then it will get thrown out pretty quick.

 

Spam is a socially constructed object, so if a site is labeled as spam and social bookmaking sites rely on their communities to vote them to the top, they are eventually weeded out like Tearabite stated above.

Theoretically all you would need is a small army of zombie computers with the ability to target an article then dig it, correct? A Trojan joined to a popular MP3 on a P2P network would be sufficient. I am sure there are people looking for a way to cash in on spamming these types of sites, if not already. Hell, look in some of the threads here that say “Dig my site”. Just tainting a good site IMHO.

 

I've seen a lot of 'Digg swapping' going on these days. I suspect if people did start doing it on the scale you describe then users that are seen to be using lots of 'fake' accounts (meaning accounts that only digg articles related to a certain site, or whatever) would be spotted and stopped.

I do occasionally submit my own stuff to digg, but I've not traded diggs, if I make the front page, then sweet, if not thats fine.

Faking digg just seems wrong, IMO.

 

you will get busted if you swap digg, some 've got account disable where other just bury the story

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=86514&page=6

 

What makes you think this isn't already happening?

http://seoblackhat.com/2006/06/03/digg-still-rigged/

 

anyone understand this video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5b_M1UHscU&search=digg hack

 

By clicking very fast on digg comments you can either digg or bury them multiple times (as many as 3 times) by clicking fast


it works! hahaahahah

 

does it? but...does it help anything?

 

I would assume that the number being show represents a value correlating to the ranking of the article but can’t say for sure. Still interesting

 

um..i think that number has nothing to do with the article but the ranking of the user since you are digging user's comment.

And i still doesn't get how it works....i am mad stupid

 

perhaps it was just not meant to be understood

 

I thought about something like that.
First I thought about proxies, but that's probably a max of a few hundred IPs at any one time, and could get tricky. Then I thought a user database in which users login, and their browser automatically takes them to the stories which need digging, in return they get digg 'points'.

The problems:
* There's not enough new stories to create a healthy amount of diggs
* Would be easy for Digg admins to join and remove the stories

Solutions:
* Create a stable/user-driven economy of diggs (ie. the more digg 'points' floating around, the less diggs you can buy with them)
* Code it so user simply login to their account and the IDs of the stories aren't shown to them, their browser window does everything else.

It's doable, but profitable? No. Which is the reason it hasn't been done. (to my knowledge)

 

digg users will kill spam before the spammer presses submit

 

Thats obviously the 'holy grail' of marketing but I just find it surprising that with the amount of time people spend trying to spam/influence google nobody appears to have launched an all out spam assault on one of the web 2.0 sites.

I suppose we could just set T0PS30 to work on getting everybody dugg.

 

Easier said than done but why spend money trying to influence people with advertising instead of spending the money on the product which people will talk about instead? Depends where you draw the line.

I don't see the worth in outcomes from digg spamming though, you get masses of 'non adsense clicking' traffic, the only way it could be worth it is if you sell a product aimed at the digging demographic, or to advertise a service.

 

Why would anyone in their right mind wan't to spend hours writing something diggable when they can spend dozens of hours developing a way to cheat?

 

Hey! What a great idea! Let's take one of the last few spam free/clean websites around and .. well.. fill it with spam! Why do you idiots even come public with retarded ideas like this