A few days ago I started a digg exchange in the freebies section on DP. While I knew it could be risky, people do this all the time and seem to get away with it. Due to my submission being perfect digg material as well as the exchange I recieved 26 diggs in less than 30mins only to be banned from digg. Do you think an end to these exchanges is needed? If I was banned because my page was actually heading for page1, then that means all the other digg trades are worthless. Thankfully my IP wasn't blocked so I created another account, although I still lost the 700+ friends I had. I wrote a blog post with all the details here http://bloggingfingers.com/blog-marketing/banned-from-diggcom/
Of course the exchanges need to stop. Digg exchanges all over webmaster forums are starting to ruin digg and fill it with crap. I'm glad they've got a good enough system in place to catch this stuff.
I'm not into straight exchanges as it reminds me too much of link farms ... there are trails everywhere. If you want to be more "stealthly" about things you would work out some kind of code and do these exchanges through IRC or a private chat room. You might make it harder for them to catch you.
Have to remember that all these social bookmarking sites have admins who read this and many other forums like DP to keep up with these exchanges as well. I am not sure where to look on IRC, but if anyone knows of marketing related channels please let me know which network it is on. Steve
Biggest problem is that people are posting the direct url the the dig page on here, and when someone clicks on it from this forum and diggs, they can easily go back and see the referrals, and see that you were exchanging diggs.
People steal deal drugs and much more....they get away with it for a while Anytime you attempt to cheat you set yourself up for the consequences. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time I wonder if the mods will give your self promoting blog posting a no follow tag like they do others....