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The Autobury & System Gaming Connection: A Theory
nethackz.com — well, well, well. I guess this story isn't meant for the digg but what the heck. I think there is some truth to whatever he has to say. I agree to some extent because the due research has been done. Read it, it's worth reading and definitely knowing.
jophillips- 160 diggs
- digg it
- CrotchetyOldMan, on 07/01/2008, -1/+10Very interesting.
- BennyGreenberg, on 07/01/2008, -0/+9very very interesting and I wonder if it solves many-a-mystery that I have seen and heard about...
Thoughts? - timethief, on 10/30/2008, -1/+10IMO this is a fascinating article that everyone using Digg should read.
- jdrohn74, on 07/01/2008, -0/+7Yeah - really opens your eyes to what goes on behind the scenes. The human element is both a blessing and a curse..
- Sheri123, on 07/01/2008, -0/+10Well I guess that I am on the "autobury" list. Since being a Digg member I have only made two submissions both quickly hit the popular upcoming lists and became #1 under their category (comedy) and the were dropped from the popular lists. Each submission was from a different web site, neither of which I have any ownership or personal interest in. They both just happened to have humor pieces that I liked and wanted to share. After submitting my first post three other people shared for me. I don't personally know any of these people. One of those people was someone whose submission I had disagreed with but was being buried by many other Digg members. I felt that this was wrong so I shared for him and stated that he had the right to his opinion. Another person who shared for me seems to be a friend of his. The third person who shared for me had shouted to me to thank me for digging several of his posts. At the time I had not made any posts and was afraid to because of all the horror stories I had heard about. I was satisfied just to digg and comment. He was kind enough to suggest that I get my feet wet and he stated that he would share my first post for me. The submission claimed the popular upcoming ladder fast and the dropped out of popular. I thought that maybe I had done something wrong. A couple of days later I made a second post and two of those three people again shared for me ( I did not ask them to). Again the submission climbed the upcoming popular ladder quickly and again it dropped out. Again I felt that I had done something wrong so I e:mailed Digg asking for help and for information as to what I had done wrong. I even began to feel that some Digg employee had it out for me for some reason as as far as I could tell I had followed all of Diggs terms. They replied with a form response that answered nothing.
Now thanks to your article I may have my answer. I don't know the three people who shared for me and I was not gaming Digg as going popular would not have done anything for me but give my ego and self confidence a boost. I know now that submitting any other posts will probably be a waste of time and that sharing for someone else may cause the same thing to happen to that person. I may still digg but if anyone shouts asking me to share for them I will not honor their request which will be best for them. I guess the moral to this is don't share for others and hope that if you submit that the wrong people don't share for you because if they do your submissions could get autoburied without you even knowing why. - DrCrankenstein, on 07/01/2008, -0/+7(I'm afraid to post. They're going to get me. Don't tell anyone.)
- ltdraper, on 07/11/2008, -0/+2I'm not sure I buy this, but it's the type of stupid thing Digg might do. What they've basically set up is a way for the black hats to take their competition out of Digg. Just subscribe to your competitor's RSS feed, and submit every story then have your friend network vote it up. Your competitor is likely to vote for their own stories, so they'll be on the autobury list too. This is even worse than their policy of banning sites that people have marked as spam without any review process. They're going to end up as a site that only lists stories from a small percentage of very popular sites. I already have an RSS reader, so I don't need that.
This doesn't mean that you don't want a large friend network on Digg, in fact you need a much larger following than you had before if this is right. You just need a natural distribution of the people that are also voting your stuff. Having a group of 50 friends that vote 100% of the time won't be useful, but having a group of 500 friends that vote 10% of the time should work out quite well. - OliverTaco, on 07/11/2008, -0/+2People keep saying "submitting your own content" or "a small number of people submitting the content" - so what? It's not against the TOS, it's perfectly reasonable, and it's not even shameless self promotion.
Lest anyone think this is sour grapes, our site was banned by an abusive user and his army of robots months ago - and Digg ended up banning his user less than two days later.
The good news is that there is traffic and revenue from sites other than Digg, so it's not such a big deal.
-OT
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