Is Digg Rigged?...Is Digg Dumb...Or Just Busted?
Is Digg Rigged?
Are "bury brigades" helping to censor Prisonplanet & Infowars reports?
by Steve Watson - Friday, March 2, 2007
Reports this week have suggested that the online news community digg may be suffering abuse at the hands of a group of users that are burying Digg stories they find ideologically unappealing.
Rumors are flying around the Internet that these so called "bury brigades" could be more than just a group of geeky self appointed censors and that it may actually be Digg themselves, or even agencies of the government, that are censoring stories and preventing the information from going viral on the net.
Wired news reports:
On Tuesday, a bug in the social news site's Digg Spy tool gave one smart Digger the ability to peer into the inner workings of the community. Namely, David LeMieux found a way to highlight which users were burying stories on Digg, and why.
Muhammad Saleem followed up LeMieux's data with a post titled, "The Bury Brigade Exists, and Here's My Proof."
The suggestion is that a select group of users are doing a great deal more burying than anyone else. Obviously this cannot be proven definitively for the moment, but it is interesting to note the subject matter of what is being buried.
The same Wired report mentioned above was submitted to digg and was immediately buried. Wired then reported that all similar reports linking to the same issue had also been buried very quickly, commenting:
Is this a legitimate act of the community, or is it censorship? Digg does have silent moderators, and there have always been rumors that they delete or bury submissions which overtly threaten Digg's reputation. My opinion: Information wants to be free, and if this is censorship, then shame on Digg. If the buries came from the community, I'm curious as to why all discussions related to the bury problem are themselves buried. Does the community not want to confront these problems?
It is highly suspicious as to why anyone would continually go to the trouble of burying these stories.
What is not so hard to believe, however, is the fact that every major report we have put out on the 9/11 revelations this week have been instantly buried, sometimes only a matter of minutes after they have been submitted.
A cursory search through David LeMieux' hacked list of buries reveals that many stories relating to 9/11 have been buried by the same group.
As soon as a story is submitted, it instantly goes into the "Upcoming Stories" section on the digg page. Once it receives enough diggs, usually around 70, Then It moves up the ranking of the upcoming stories section and can quickly hit the home page, unless users choose to digg it down or bury it.
Digg has never revealed exactly how the bury system works, but they tell us that the number of reports required to bury is based on a sliding scale that takes several factors into consideration (such as number of diggs, reports, time of day, topic submitted to, etc.).
However, this system is clearly flawed as many of our reports have gone on to receive thousands of diggs and hundreds of comments AFTER they have been buried. All this has been of little use because once a story is buried it cannot be brought back and thus cannot hit the front page of digg.com and be seen by millions of readers who do not normally visit Prisonplanet and Infowars.
Digg's bury system has been accused of being totally undemocratic because it allows a few users to prevent the many from reading articles and making their own mind up on the material.
For a story to be buried after just a few minutes defeats the whole point of the community and has thus prompted many users to complain to digg, who have responded by promising to "look into it".
It seems that the "bury brigades" are working together and are closely monitoring every story that is submitted, hitting bury and then "digging down" all the comments, as soon as they come in, which is rumored to bury a story more quickly.
In order to do this, you have to keep refreshing the page every 2 seconds or so. It is difficult to believe that someone or some group would dedicate themselves to doing this without having a purpose behind it, and the evidence so far suggests that a select few are the ones doing the burying.
We encourage all of our regular readers to digg down the negative comments, and digg up 9/11 truther comments, when submitting to digg. We wait with baited breath to discover whether this article will also be instantly buried by the unidentified censors.
For more information on how digg works, click here.
Is Digg dumb...Or Just Busted?
by Douglas Herman - 3-2-7
I don't dig Digg. Maybe I'm too dumb to get it. What seems like a simple website warehouse for stories "Digged" to the top of newsworthiness (stories I wouldn't waste my time reading) seems, at first glance, like a great idea.
But I took a closer look at the archive. This isn't Rense with a smattering of well-written essays, nor the Liberty Forum with their "Flags" for intelligent commentary. Rather a sort of Junk Brothers for stories that somehow rose to the top of the Digg ratings for God-only-knows-what-reason.
I mean, check the top entries for February 27 in their Popular Archive. Very esoteric, right? Some signs of intelligent life, right? Sort of geeky, gizmo, computer-oriented, right? I mean, "Geek Squad Charges $415 Dollars To Replace A HArd Drive" (2,777 diggs) is pretty relevant to millions of computer owners. Right? But what do you make of all those people recommending, or "Digging," a story about how "Coca Cola Redesigns cans" (1,873 diggs)? Trivial beyond all comprehension, right?
But Digg got busted the other night, caught being just another gatekeeper, like the BBC. In fact they got busted because of that story about the BBC. According to the Digg honchos, readers vote on the relevancy of a story (a lie) and can bury an irrelevant story and laud a newsworthy story.
So WHAT was the top Digg-of-The-Day, on February 27? Another cartoon called, "I will not throw paper airplanes in class" (4,577 diggs). Is it just me, or do all these Digged stories indicate a myopic world? Especially while three US aircraft carriers lurk offshore Iran, awaiting the word to start a nuclear war. Is Digg dumb, or are the people who dig it dumber?
Next I clicked on "Science vs Faith, A simple picture says it all." (3,868 diggs). I wanted to see what sort of picture transcended religion and science. The image of the Shroud of Turin perhaps in the smoke of a shuttle launch? Now I confess, my interests are weird science, religious hypocrisy, archeology, history, fossil-hunting, conspiracy theories and how to detect conspiracy theories, government plots and plotters, political shysters and how to spot them, military blunders and the confessions of simple soldiers used by callous wartime leaders, political whistleblowers, collapsing skyscrapers (since 9/11) and lost-and-found treasures and where to find them. Looking at some geeky design (hardly a picture) left a lot to be desired. Some poster even called it a cartoon. And this got 3,868 diggs? Wonder what Galileo would make of it.
How many stories in their Popular Archive catch YOUR interest? Admittedly, many of the computer-related links exceed my knowledge and understanding. Many more appear adolescent and superficial. And these were the TOP Digged stories. How many would interest the average person? To the average over-sexed computer geek, ALL of them of course. Digg aficionados, it appears, are way smarter than the rest of us but way dumber than the rest of us--in a trivial, post-pubescent sort of way.
Love it or hate it, Digg stories reflect their founder, a UNLV dropout/wunderkind named Kevin Rose. Not surprisingly and to their credit, the most popular links on Digg hardly represent a cross section of the average Ana Nicole-addled, Superbowl addicted, NASCAR- distracted, poor white trash American. Diggers, at first glance, appear to be of above intelligence, a cross between a computer tech prodigy and Beavis and Butthead.
But then a conspiracy theorist a 911Blogger.com caught Digg dumping top stories for their, yup, conspiracy theory angles. We had all read that accusation before. Until now we had always ignored them. Nobody knew if the accusations were true or not but, being a conspiracy-theorist, I could dig it.
According to one critic who wrote to Digg tech support, a fellow called J. A. Simon, who referred to himself as SuperNova: "It appears Digg is not interested in media democracy. In your 'How Digg Works' section your website Digg states the following: "Digg is a digital media democracy. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you." This is appears to be deceptive. Your company is purposely suppressing a story."
Digg techies responded to SuperNova: "That story was reported as lame and subsequently removed by the digg community. Please review our FAQ (digg.com/faq) for more information on the promotion/burial of stories. This is just how the system works. This is crowd-generated media. There was a high number of diggs with very low karma and a high number of buries from users with very high karma. There is no conspiracy (emphasis mine), there is no abuse, the buries happened from veteran users on digg with proven track records."
Oh what tangled webs we weave. High karma? Veteran users? Proven track record? Things that make you go Hmmmm. Can you dig it?
OK. So a story gets "voted" on by high karma veteran geeks at Digg? Weird but the same thing happens every day down at your local newspaper by a couple of editors without any karma at all. But Digg was supposed to be different, right? Not like the power wielded by corrupt Catholic church officials of the Inquisition who voted on whom to torture. Digg would have let readers vote on Galileo---an early planetary conspiracy theorist--and not censor his views by a secret group of veteran users, with high karma and a proven track record. Right?
But Simon, SuperNova, wouldn't let Digg placate him with obvious contradictions and obfuscations. He responded:
"RE: Suppressed Story On Digg - BBC Reported Building 7 Had Collapsed 20 Minutes Before It Fell. At the time I am sending this email (Feb 27) it currently has 1,364 Digg's (and) it is not listed under ANY of your top story lists.When I check under the top stories of the last 24 hours, I see that it is absent. According to the stories that I see in these sections and the number of 'Digg's' attached to them, it clearly should be listed in the top ten of all three of these categories. This information clearly exposes your company as being deceptive and a practitioner of censorship. I would appreciate a prompt response clarifying your reason for doing this. Sincerely, J. A. Simon"
As you can see from the list of TOP stories of February 27, in the Popular Archive, 1,364 Diggs would clearly put that story among the top links. Certainly more worthy, and more highly-rated, than paper airplanes, sex toys and a Borat DVD.
But that was before Digg got Busted.
David Cohn, at Wired, wrote, after the revelation: "Amid all the claims that Digg has a biased Bury Brigade, it's actually reassuring to know that a network of Digg users has risen up to try and get to the bottom of this."
Only because they got caught, Dave. How long would it have taken them to fix their fraud if some intrepid soul hadn't busted them? Just like the BBC---ironically because of the BBC fraud---Digg got caught fukking with their files.
Maybe I'm too dumb to dig Digg. Or maybe Digg just doesn't get it. Maybe Digg--now that they've been blatantly caught censoring information---doesn't get the intrinsic nature of the Internet. The freedom of ALL information. Sure some information scares the hell out of all of us. This is an Orwellian world. And you are either part of the problem---Digg and the BBC for example--or part of the solution. Because freedom of information is far more important than how to rig a computer or make it run faster. Or to paraphrase Henry David Thoreau: "What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" So what is the point of a perfect computer if you haven't got an uncensored planet to put it on?
Wacky naturalist and amateur fossil hunter, Douglas Herman writes for Rense.com occasionally. Don't bother digging this story; the Fukks there will just Buryy itt.
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