Not Digging It!

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Here at Hoggers we dropped the "Digg It" button over a year ago because there was evidence that they were grabbing content without giving attribution. Now there is evidence that the sight has been hijacked by wingnuts.

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media
site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign
of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and
deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation
has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one
year.

�The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I�ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.�
-phoenixtx (aka vrayz)

Digg seemed like a good idea at the time but.......

The concept behind the site is simple. Submitted webpages (news,
videos, or images) can be voted up (digging) or down (burying) by each
user, sort of a democracy in the internet model. If an article gets
enough diggs, it leaves the upcoming section and reaches the front page
where most users spend their time, and can generate thousands of page
views.

This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby
users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to
the front page to give them traction. This was evident with the daily
spamming of the upcoming Political section with white supremacist
material from the British National Party (articles which rarely reached
the front page). The inverse of this effect is more devastating
however. Bury brigades could effectively remove stories from the
upcoming sections by collectively burying them.

One bury brigade in particular is a conservative group that has
become so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90%
of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3
hours, regardless of subject material. Literally thousands of stories
have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group.
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, so by
doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a
whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in
essence: censoring content). This group is known as the Digg
�Patriots�.

And we thought the wingnuts didn't understand the internet tubes.  Of course all is fair in love and war and I have participated in a few Goggle bombs myself.  But the bottom line is don't digg it.