Now, talking about Digg, I've never read much of it before but recently I decided to stop by and browse some stories. I found that the Homepage and category pages are dominated by submissions that are obviously boring and they all have received around 400 diggs. Where is the catch? What is the secret? There must be some. Please tell me why a story about Joran Dumpensen who has been appointed a head of a GimmeYourMoney bank branch in a town I've never heard about hits the Business news first page in Digg? It cannot be that more than 400 people have found this story amusing, inspiring or anywhere near important. Of course, Joran is not a real story - I just grabbed an example out of thin air to illustrate my worries. Many of the stories are similar to this example. Have you heard any rumours or talks on how people get their stories on first pages? Browsing through the rubbish diggs, I found a marvellous story on how a guy makes his newsletter list work. I'll let you guess how many diggs has he received. 400 you say? Wrong - only 5 diggs... There are more amazingly funny stories and tips that die unnoticed by receiving only a handful of diggs. Not that I'm too bothered getting my stories on top. There's no point if you look at the traffic monetizing side (and forget about brand building etc etc) How do you think the big banks and institutions get their idiotic stories on top? Can it be that they pay people to digg? That's the most obvious explanation. What do you think?
I know of a few services out there, that you can pay and they will get you votes on your Digg, its called Subvert and Profit. They could use a program like that.
Did you rather mean Pervert and Subfit? Thank you for this info. I must admit I've been idealizing the cyberspace and living in the cloud world. I would really like to hear what Digg has to say about this. Not enough of the bankers robbin' us of our money to pay their nephews perky bonuses, they're flooding socials with their rubbish stories too There should be system in place that prevents fake diggs. It is not difficult - you just need to code a program that follows a pattern to detect suspicious behaviour. Large advertising providers use such systems to kill fake clicks.
Big banks and institutions don't need to pay or come up with some cunning plan to cheat Digg and end up on the front page. They can afford to buy legitimate and targeted ads anywhere they want. Why would they risk their reputation to receive some crappy, untreated traffic from Digg and then have a few bloggers blog about them? They sign multimillion advertisement deals legitimately.
Not that the bank in question was any big, but yeah, I understand what you mean and it kind of makes sense. But then how can you explain that a rubbish story gets 400 diggs? And not only one rubbish story - several of those each day. And each of them get around 400 diggs... You don't think our poor Joran has 399 devoted friends who, what a surprise, all got a Digg account
It's not difficult to get 30-40 diggs on a story with lots of exchanges. Once you get those, some people 'digg' you even without reading the story. But getting 400 diggs can't be easy
Because power users can submit any bit of crap they want and it will probably get Dugg. Even if only 1% of the people like the story they submit, they get so many fans and people watching them that the chances are it will end up on the front page.
Yeah many powerdiggers get paid money to dig certain items and blast them out to their friends. I have heard some of these people get paid anywhere from $150-$500 a digg. Then of course there are other services out there to pay for so many diggs such as you pay $10 and you get anywhere between 20-25 diggs.
I voted "I've heard rumors that money is being paid for diggs" only because "of course people are paying for diggs, I could name three place right now you could buy them if you want" wasn't an option. There are automated software you can use to digg stories from your fake accounts. There are also the much more cost effective "trading diggs" services that are available. Many of these sites are invitation only which may be why they have not been mentioned here yet, with the exception of Subvert and Profit. I can guarantee there are several of these services but I'm not naming names. Nor do I have any experience with them whatsoever.