Buried By The Brigade At Digg 624
Even if you just arrived from Mars and have never heard of Digg, that description of the service should make it obvious how easy it is to game the system, by rounding up groups of friends to vote on stories that you want to promote, or to bury stories that you want to kill. The former type of abuse (and it is abuse, under Digg's Terms of Use; search for "organized effort") is far more common, since people usually have more incentive (commercial or otherwise) to promote their own work than to bury someone else's. And in fact, Digg has announced that the next version of the service will remove the "bury" button, replacing it with a "Report" button for reporting bona fide cases of abuse, not just to bury boring stories.
The thinking seems to be that abusive "digging" to promote a story, is less harmful than abusive "burying", and this has the ring of plausibility — that a creative effort is better than a destructive one. After all, Alternet had previously highlighted several artificial right-wing "digg brigades" mentioned in their story (Diggs And Buries, theliberalheretic, etc.), but they didn't blow the lid off of the situation until their report on the Digg Patriots bury brigade, as if to say, "Now we've found something really scandalous!" Annalee Newitz cheekily reported on how she bought votes to boost a story to the front page of Digg, but probably would have felt guilty if she'd hired a service to bury someone else's story. And when a Digg user organized an effort to bury Ron Paul stories that he thought were "spamming" the system, Ron Paul supporters protested that they were merely organizing to vote up stories they agreed with — the clear implication being that this was more honorable than organizing to vote stories down.
But this, I think, is a fallacy. If a story's ranking is artificially inflated, then the extra eyeballs for that story have to come from somewhere, and they come from users paying less attention to the other stories that the phony up-and-comer pushed out of the way. Artificially bumping a story up is just as harmful as artificially burying a story, but the harm is distributed among many innocent victims, not just one. (By the same reasoning, in fact, you could argue that burying a story does no net harm to other users of the Digg site, because the harm done to one story is cancelled out by the benefit to all the other stories that rise in prominence when the victimized story is pushed out of the way. So by strict economic logic, recruiting friends to boost your own story at the expense of everyone else's, is actually more harmful than organizing a bury brigade!)
So I don't think that Digg's replacing the "bury" button with a "report" button will fix the problem. For one thing, obviously groups could abuse the "report" button in the same way — issuing calls to action to report a story for violating the TOU. Since a flurry of bona fide abuse reports is presumably what Digg uses to identify and remove truly abusive stories like MLM spam, how are they going to tell the difference between these cases and cases of abusive "reporting"? (My suggestion: See if there is a sudden change in the percentage of users who view a story and make an abuse report. For stories that are genuine TOU violations, the percentage of users who "report" it should remain steady; for stories that are victimized by a "report brigade," you'll see a sudden spike in viewers and in the percentage of those viewers who report the story for abuse. This might have worked for detecting and stopping the bury brigades as well, although we'll never know now.)
But more fundamentally, even if this change does stop the "bury/report brigades" from killing stories at will, that only fixes the most obvious symptom of the underlying problem, which is that the system can be gamed by recruiting your friends to vote either way. It won't stop "brigades" from artificially promoting shallow stories that agree with their opinions, which does the same net harm overall.
Indeed, the most long-term harm that the DiggPatriots Yahoo Group might have done is that their cheating was so egregious that it makes other examples of cheating look benign by comparison, and might prevent people from realizing that "benign cheating" is just as harmful. As detailed in the Alternet report, the DiggPatriots group talked openly about cycling through different Digg accounts and circumventing bans on their IP addresses. The welcome message to the Yahoo Group told new users that the group was operating "under the radar." The group leader, a woman with the handle "bettverboten," talked about how to prevent Digg from monitoring their actions. And of course the vast majority of posts were calls to bury stories. But what if all of that had been inverted? If the group had operated in the open, while still focusing on recruiting conservative members? If each user limited to themselves to only one Digg account like they were supposed to? And if they focused not on burying stories, but on digging stories that promoted their viewpoints? Just as bad. It just doesn't sound as bad.
I still think the only way to make Digg a true meritocracy, would be to use some version of an algorithm I outlined in an earlier article, inauspiciously titled "How to Stop Digg-cheating, Forever." The gist of it is that in addition to collecting votes from friends, stories should be shown to a random subset of users on the site (perhaps in a box that occasionally appears at the top of the screen when they're logged in), who are asked to vote it up or down. The votes of a random sampling of users would be more representative of how much value the story would have to the Digg community as a whole. Even if most users who are asked to vote on a "random story" simply ignore the request, all you need is to show the story to a large enough sample that you can measure the difference in responses to a truly good story vs. one that has been promoted by digg-cheaters. You don't necessarily have to run this procedure for every story, only the ones that are about to gain some benefit from a large number of diggs (such as being pushed to the front page), and you need to decide whether the story really deserves that big boost. The only way to game that system would be to organize a group of dedicated Digg users so enormous that they constituted a significant percentage of all users on the system — something pretty hard to do without getting caught.
Still, the only site that I know of, that uses a version of this "random sampling" algorithm is HotOrNot.com, which lets you recruit your friends to vote on the "hotness" of your picture on a scale of 1 to 10 (by sending them a link to that specific picture), but also shows a stream of random pictures to visitors, so that your picture can collect votes from strangers. If the votes from the users who visit your picture via the link are significantly different from the votes from users who see your picture via the random stream, then HotOrNot discounts the votes from users who view your page via the link. This prevents digg-style gaming from people who want all their friends to give them a 10. (Note that if you think about it, this is essentially the same as always throwing out the votes from people who visit your picture via the link. If you collect votes from group A and B, but you only count the votes from group A if they agree with the votes from group B, then you're really only counting votes from group B! All the extra votes really give you is the ability to brag that X many people voted on your picture.)
This seems like the simplest way to prevent Digg-cheating, although there may be others. Still unresolved is how to solve the general problem of "gaming" in traditional media and the blogosphere. For the foreseeable future, it's going to be the simple truth that if a major media outlet wants to run a story, it will be heard, and if no media outlet wants to run it, it won't be heard, regardless of how many viewers or readers would have voted in some hypothetical poll that, yes, they want to read that story, and yes, they liked it afterward. That's true for Internet articles as well, except to the extent that a deserving article might be rescued from obscurity by Digg, but the more that system can be gamed, the less it will reward articles that really deserve it. Digg is gameable because power users can recruit votes from their friends; the media and the blogosphere are so obviously "gameable" that we don't even call it "gameable," because "power users" — media outlets and A-list bloggers — can run whatever they want. Right now, the only way I can think of to change this situation that is even logically possible, would be for a site like Digg to adopt some version of the random-sampling algorithm, and to continue growing in power until a significant percentage of the public (not just Internet users, but everybody) relied on it for information. Then, if you had something important to say, people would hear it, but you wouldn't be able to cheat your way to the top.
The ultimate irony is that Alternet's story may never have seen the light of day, if it hadn't been the beneficiary of the same gameable, non-meritocratic inefficiencies that exist in the media-blogo-outrage-o-sphere, just as they exist on Digg. Yes, the Alternet story deserved to be heard, but you don't get the publicity you deserve, you get the publicity that you organize, and Alternet had the organizational publicity structure in place to get their voice heard. If a kid blogging from his bedroom had infiltrated the Digg Patriots group and made essentially the same discovery, would anybody ever have heard about it? (Well, maybe, because of the political hot-button factor — but even then, only after the story had been picked up by a major site like Alternet.) A truly meritocratic Digg algorithm could make it possible to get a good story out without a lot of organizational support behind it — and to ensure that an organized effort can't kill a good story either.
Left Leaning... (Score:0, Informative)
Interesting because aside from the Ron Paul phenomenon that lasted for a few months on Digg, just about EVERY posting is left-leaning as are the comments.
And what about yelp? (Score:5, Informative)
I have been yelping for about a year and I see the owners of places abusing the crap out of that system. I now actually have yelp staffers emailing me asking me to change my reviews at the bequest of an owner of a restaurant or it will be removed...
Re:How is this new? (Score:2, Informative)
Wasn't meta-moderation invented to help ward against this on /.?
Re:How is this new? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What a joke. (Score:4, Informative)
He's wrong (Score:5, Informative)
But this, I think, is a fallacy. If a story's ranking is artificially inflated, then the extra eyeballs for that story have to come from somewhere, and they come from users paying less attention to the other stories that the phony up-and-comer pushed out of the way. Artificially bumping a story up is just as harmful as artificially burying a story, but the harm is distributed among many innocent victims, not just one.
Nah, burying skews votes by not allowing corrections. Lets imagine that there are 50 people who are gaming the system by being an organized collective and that Digg needs 50 buries to kill a story. If it was Reddit, the 50 downvotes could be balanced by, say 100 upvotes. But on Digg, not even 1000 'diggs' can counter the 50 buries. This allows a small group to have a significant chilling effect and effectively a veto on the content. Artificially bumping up is much less harmful.
Re:And what about yelp? (Score:5, Informative)
In short, Yelp is pretty much useless as a source of unbiased information.
Re:What a joke. (Score:4, Informative)
Got any citations to back that up? Go do your own study, then you'll be allowed to spout that shit.
Re:He's wrong (Score:5, Informative)
What's more, even if 1000 diggs could counter the 50 buries, because the bury brigade were mass-burying articles as soon as they were posted, no-one else ever saw the articles and had the opportunity to digg them. Abusive digging is somewhat self-correcting - as soon as an article reaches prominence thanks to the mass diggs, a lot more people will see it and attempt to bury it - but abusive burying fundamentally can't self-correct even if the site did allow it to be counteracted in theory.
Oh, and this bury brigade were doing this to every single article from certain sites they disliked such as Huffington Post, effectively making it impossible for any article from these sites to appear on the Digg front page. That's a pretty big deal.
Re:This could be a good thing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Haha (Score:4, Informative)
Ah yes, the Dixiecrats [wikipedia.org] and the Solid South [wikipedia.org]. Funny enough, the voting patterns switched after the Dem party passed the Civil Right bill back in '65... the formerly "I'll never vote Republican" voters switched at the "betrayal". Consequently, Nixon/GOP leveraged this to victory in 68 and 72 using the Southern Strategy [wikipedia.org]... plus ca change (D->R) plus c'est la meme chose (ah, racists).
Re:tl;dr (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Haha (Score:2, Informative)
It is not my fault that your Founding Fathers never decided to give your country a name...
Meanwhile the rest of us Americans in the thirty-four countries that do have names are just supposed to "put up with it"?
Let's see what the world has to say about this, no?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America [wikipedia.org]
Mhmm, this sends us to a disambiguation page... lets click on the second option...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States [wikipedia.org]
Ah! There you are! So it is United States and not just "America" after all!
But wait! I forgot! Wikipedia is part of the fag-euro, United Nations, Communist conspiracy! Let's try Conservapedia:
http://www.conservapedia.com/America [conservapedia.com]
Nope! Another disambiguation page!
http://www.conservapedia.com/United_States_of_America [conservapedia.com]
Ah, there you are! The US of A again, not America
Re:Haha (Score:5, Informative)
The racist past of the Democratic Party is an interesting story.
Clearly, there were lots of racists who called themselves Democrats, but over the past several decades, with the ascent of people of color in the Democratic Party, those racists would have become more and more uncomfortable as Democrats. Today, a black man is the head of the Democratic Party. By definition, any serious racist would obviously not remain a member of a party that is led by a black man.
So where do you think those racist Democrats went? Maybe they just stopped voting, maybe they joined some third party (though the numbers don't really bear this out). There's really only one party to which the racist "Dixiecrats" could have gone.
There have been 98 black members of congress. Since 1900, only 5 of them have been African-American. There are currently zero African-Americans among the 178 Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Re:Wrong, stories visible to counteracting groups (Score:5, Informative)
no-one else ever saw the articles
Don't forget the articles were originally somewhere on a real site, where people read them (like, Huffington Post). And the Digg button was right there... so no small number of people would be sufficient to overwhelm even a moderate number of people who read a site regularly and used the Digg button. It's not like burying a story on Slashdot where you would have no way to know Slashdot might have been talking about a story.
That's one of the things that strikes me as really funny about the complaint, is that you naturally had large groups of people working moderations for a story just because of the Digg button. You could only bury stuff from small sites that no-one was visiting enough to Digg up anyway!
Nah, once buried, it stays buried, regardless of the 'diggs', original site or not.
From the alternet article:
When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page,
Re:Haha (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sorry, but that's not even close to the truth. In 1860, there was a concerted effort in the slave states to expand slavery, even into Central and South America. The slaves represented a huge part of the wealth of whites in the South.
This business about "States' Rights" being the main issue of the Civil War is just an effort to whitewash the history of the Confederacy. The fact that the Confederate "battle flag" remains a popular symbol among whites in the South (and racists in the North) is just an indication that there is still resentment that their free labor was taken from them. The fact that most "right to work" states were also slave states shows that they're still trying to figure out a way to replace that free labor.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
the near epileptic fit the left had over Bush
Yes, the blind, irrational hatred of George W Bush was a sight to behold. What did he do to earn such enmity? Besides the two wars, the secret prisons, the torture, the illegal wiretaps, Katrina, and the collapse of the economy, what exactly did he do that was so bad?
Re:If it's wrong then why does Digg encourage it? (Score:3, Informative)
You're a bit behind the times there. Shouts have been gone for almost a year and a half. The Digg Patriots apparently organized themselves shortly thereafter because they lost this tool. Also note that while you can see anything your friends have dugg, there is no way to see what they have buried.
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
You think Alex Jones is a lefty? You think that the 9/11 truthers are from the Left?
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
Considering a member of George Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts at the University of Virginia in 2002, said that the attack on Iraq was to protect Israel [atimes.com], there is some justification for their thoughts.
Re:Haha (Score:3, Informative)
Except that you've all built up a narrative of what you think mainstream america should be, not what it is. [mediamatters.org]
Wow. A PDF from Media Matters saying that the US is a liberal country and not a conservative one. Well, now I'm convinced.
Re:Well it is an alternate form of bumping (Score:3, Informative)
What is odd is how it's all of a sudden a "big deal." Digg's had a group of left-wing Bury Brigades for years (as covered in 2007 by Wired [wired.com] and a number of other news organizations), but it wasn't a problem until now? [google.com]
It's sort of like noticing this kind of thing going on [youtube.com], which seems to get missed. Or the fact that the guys with "Obama in a hitler mustache" signs at Tea Party rallies were actually Democrats of the Lyndon LaRouche cult [washington...endent.com].
Say what you want about the Tea Party guys, there are plenty of kooks there just as there are plenty of kooks at Democrat rallies, but the "ooh only if we think it will make political hay for our side" behavior of much of the media is getting rather old. Digg "bury brigades" are old, stale news, from both sides.
Re:If I have to choose between dig and bury... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not so sure about that. Controlling access to the front page is powerful. Once something makes the front page the general liberal leaning populace takes over and it will generally appear in the sidebars as well if it's of interest.
It should also be mentioned that digg has been piloting a random approch for quite a while. It will occasionally display a box above the article list asking you to read and vote on an article. If it gets enough votes it goes to the front page. The biggest problem with it is that there is a timer on it. I probably see them twice a week or so, and I'm there frequently.
Re:He's wrong (Score:2, Informative)
It's exactly like abusive modding on /., which is why there's the often-ignored instruction to moderators telling them to read at -1.
Re:Well it is an alternate form of bumping (Score:2, Informative)
I think it's important to note that the Wired article didn't conclude their was a brigade, probably many individuals with individual agendas. Also, they didn't mention a side to which these buriers leaned.
Also, the Lyndon LaRouche "Plants" weren't plants at all, they wanted to be Tea Party members. Read the articles.
Re:Haha (Score:3, Informative)
By definition, any serious racist would obviously not remain a member of a party that is led by a black man.
I guess that leaves them out of the GOP too.
There have been 98 black members of congress. Since 1900, only 5 of them have been African-American.
What? Am I reading this right? Did you mean only 5 of them have been Republican?
Re:Haha (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, should have read "Since 1900, only 5 of them have been Republican".