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ThinkProgress.org is pwning Digg.com, Netscape.com, & Reddit.com

rikki-tikki-tavis-garden.blogs… — Professional political operatives of the Center for American Progress are quietly manipulating your Digg.com, Netscape.com and Reddit.com user experience. Look here to find out who they are and what political machinery is behind their manipulation of your social computing experience.

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  • dmjarrington, on 10/15/2007, -11/+9Why don't you just answer the questions posed instead of painting them as "secret agents." This is a stupid article.
  • scottbgc, on 10/15/2007, -10/+8dmjarrington...amen...i hardley think they 'owning' digg...they have a right to post just the same as rikkitikkitavi...there is a lot of spam on digg, but hardley see how these 'operatives' are harming digg...that is what digg is designed for, then the community either reads it or not...there are just as many 'right wingers' doing the same thing...
    • Jaymoon, on 10/12/2007, -11/+13Um, have you seen pitviper's profile? He doesn't do anything BUT submit TP "articles".

      Makes you wonder, why would somebody do nothing on digg but submit any and every story from just ONE website.... The sheer fun of it?

      That's why I like to participate in a little practice called burrying stories. Every week or so I go through digg and search "ThinkProgress". Any story from TP shows up, and I mark them as SPAM. I know one person marking them as spam doesn't do anything. But if enough people do it, then maybe these paid submitters can work a little harder to push their crap on people.

      You ask me why I would blindly mark every TP story as spam? I must be a right-wing nut right? Well here's how I see it. If I wanted to read every TP story, I would go to their site...
    • monkeywizard, on 10/12/2007, -12/+10Because the public has the right to ***** know what's going on, douchebag.

      Funny how lies are fed to us, but when the truth starts to emerge it's "shaping the opinion".

      It's called truth, and I'm sure most people don't want us to see it.
    • The_Wallbanger, on 10/12/2007, -7/+10Have you noticed the "Digg It" buttons at the bottom of blog posts lately? Well they are buttons designed by Digg for the purpose of driving readers to Digg.com. Bloggers and webmasters have incorporated it into their own sites for each story they post. In order to have a "Digg It" button, you need the story posted on Digg. The Digg accounts where every story submitted is from a particular website are the website owners submitting their article so a "Digg It" button will work.

      There's no controversy. And this isn't spam. More importantly, Digg will thrive because of these two-way website relationships.
    • The_Wallbanger, on 10/12/2007, -5/+5Another thing - You have to realize that whether you find the story on Digg originally, or find it on a blog that links to Digg, you will still have to be a Digg user to get your vote to count. So no matter how you come across the story you are still a member of the Digg Community. We are all in it together. Don't be angry that the attitudes of the community don't skew to your political leanings.
  • thenativeraver, on 10/12/2007, -9/+6*Beware of the blogspam*
  • walkerblackwell, on 10/15/2007, -7/+13If you go to jlegum's profile, you'll see that he points his website to the organization he works for: thinkprogress. He isn't a political operative at all. More just a politician. There's nothing wrong with being a politician be you a right-winger or a left-winger or in-between or a nut-job. Who the hell cares? I don't want digg to be some sheltered enclave of semi-articulate dumbed-down news-blurb links. I want digg to be a place were people can get into really good productive arguments over content and policy. :-) I want to go to thinkprogress.com and Washington Post and all the republo-blogs too and get taste of it all. Only than can I be informed. Being angry or scared of a news/opinion site like thinkprogress is just evidence of ones in-ability to grasp a full view of any subject as well as evidence of a deep-seated fear that maybe ones own opinions might be wrong as time continues.
  • andrewr, on 10/12/2007, -11/+6Linked to your blog? Lame.
  • DeadLikeMe, on 10/15/2007, -11/+8You are just making ***** up trying to change the conversation to who is ***** with us (the left) rather then who is ***** us over (the right)
  • spdracerx, on 10/15/2007, -10/+11I'm not sure if this is irony or hypocrisy... You're calling out the people at thinkprogress.org for digging their own stories, but you're doing it by digging your own blog.
    • RikkiTikkiTavi, on 10/12/2007, -6/+9Their staff should be welcome to Digg stories pointing to their site that have been submitted by Digg users WHO DON'T WORK FOR THE SITE BEING REFERENCED. However, no company or organization should have their staff and members colluding to submit and promote their own stories to drive traffic to their own site! To stop this practice, don't you think turn about is fair play?
    • spdracerx, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4Perhaps. I certainly don't condone trying to game the system in this fashion.

      You do have to admit, though, there is some irony at work here.
    • lunchbucket, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Id' like to thank you , riki, for your post. I think it's important that people know that thinkprogress is being pushed by staffers. I looked at their profiles, it's all thinkprogress stuff, and they rarely ever comment, which is odd.

      Still, for all the obvious gaming, the thinkprogress crew rightly contains most of it's digging to the political opinion section, so I'm not greatly upset about this.

      That front page is mostly useless anyway; if it's not thinkprogress, it's lewrockwell, or crooksand liars, or mediamatters, so I doubt if they're doing much more than preaching to the converted, which seems a sad waste of an expensive Harvard education. Malkin and LGF might rival these sources were they not beaten down instantly. Even if that weren't the case, it still wouldn't save it.

      I spend my opinion category time in the up and comings, where you do get to see a huge variety of opinion sources.
    • Jaymoon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@lunchbucket:

      I agree with you there. Although Malkin and Little Green Footballs do get their share of "Frontpage exposure", they are 99% of the time buried within minutes.

      One example I couldn't help but point out is that a recent digg story about the man who tore down the 9/11 memorial. Not one word on that entiry story submitted was opinion. It was simply posting a blurb from the New York Sun or whatever the source was, as well as a quick synopsis of the story.

      Yes, it hit the front page, but quickly dissapeared once word got out that a Malkin story was on the frontpage. Again, no opinion on the story at all. People blindly buring because the website was Malkin's (Which also happens to have a "digg it" link as well...).
  • portermason, on 10/15/2007, -6/+5I actually see no harm whatsoever in a site posting every one of it's articles to digg. Whichever one's people find interesting will be voted up and make the front page. Whichever one's people don't, won't.

    And as far collusion, if it's a small cabal of users continually voting stories up, then this new digg algorithm will guard against it. If, on the other hand, it's a bunch of digg users voting a story up, from an organization who's smart enough to get their content in front of the eyes of diggers, then... who cares?

    It's not as though a right-leaning site can't do the same thing. These buttons are encouraged by digg and are all over half the blogs on the Web.

    And for the record, I just read the post on ThinkProgress informing their users about digg and letting them know they can help them out by signing up, and it isn't "smug" at all.
  • portermason, on 10/15/2007, -6/+1By the way, this guy's whole blog consists of this one post.

    Care to wager he's working for a right-leaning competitor of ThinkProgress trying to pose as a "private citizen" as he calls us?

    What does that even mean? Lobbyists are private citizens. And even if they weren't, are government officials not allowed to submit stuff to Digg?

    Anyway, even if he is a lobbyist for the right, he has every right to make a fake blog just like ThinkProgress can (very publicly) ask people to vote for them on Digg.
    • RikkiTikkiTavi, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5@portermason
      "Care to wager he's working for a right-leaning competitor of ThinkProgress trying to pose as a 'private citizen' as he calls us?"

      I'll gladly take that wager! Unlike the ThinkProgress.org staff, I don't work for a political organization of any kind and nobody is paying me surf Digg.

      I'm just an average Digg user who created the blog when I noticed the ThinkProgess.org staff's Digg/Netscape/Reddit abuse. When the problem goes away, so will my blog.

    • portermason, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I'll take your word for it, RTTavi! Just saying it looked like that. Like the screenname, by the way. :)

      And jarland, I see your point, and I don't even disagree that bigger sites coming in here and submitting their own stories could end up making Digg lame... but I don't see how you draw the line. The whole point of Digg is ANYONE can post stuff. While this gives power to a random person, it also doesn't disallow someone from Microsoft or TP or wherever from posting all their stories. Digg just gives equal power to any individual to submit and vote on things.

      Anyway, I don't disagree that if Digg just becomes a conduit for big companies to advertise things (like MySpace) it essentially becomes useless. But I also don't see exactly how you disallow actions like this.

      Maybe the only rule I could see being enforced to try and deal with this is limiting a user's ability to submit stories repeatedly from the same domain name. That way, individual users could only post one story per week from a particular domain. Could help prevent stuff like this, and also generally help to make the news on Digg as diverse as possible.

      Thoughts on that?
    • portermason, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That sounds good!
  • elebrio, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3What about Lewrockwell and Mises.org, its not just thinkprogress and crooksandliars.
  • RikkiTikkiTavi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4@elebrio
    "What about Lewrockwell and Mises.org, its not just thinkprogress and crooksandliars."

    As long as the staff of those sites and not the ones submitting and promoting their own content (exclusively). I can live with that kind of free speech reigning on Digg.
    • lunchbucket, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@Rikki:

      "I'm not interested in the difference between right and wrong. I'm interested in the difference between wrong and fun." --- P.J. O'Rourke

      Right now, the the opinion front page is not only not fun, it's the most worthless front page in all of Digg.

      I leads me to wonder whether the fantastic four's efforts are not ultimately self defeating. Advocacy is pointless unless the material is actually read. If a fellow can already guess what's likely clogging the front page prior to clicking the link, why bother?

      Alternatively, if one is already a thinkprogress type, why not just go to the source?

      They'll know how that pans out from their traffic patterns. We'll know by whether they're still at it in a couple of month's time.
    • RikkiTikkiTavi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@lunchbucket

      Maybe their efforts are self-defeating in a way. Since last August, the "Fantastic Four" (clever) seem to spend FAR less time submitting to Netscape & Reddit because their submissions there have gotten FAR fewer "diggs." On the other hand, their spending MUCH more time on Digg because they are having MUCH more success here.

      ThinkProgress.org's "Fantastic Four" are professionals. You can bet they are monitoring the hits their site is getting and capitalizing on what works to increase traffic. Right now, they seem to judge gaming Digg well worth their time.
    • lunchbucket, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Given Digg's demographics, I wouldn't be surprised.

      Thanks, again, for bringing this all above board. It will be interesting to see whether wares can be peddled on Digg for fun and profit.

  • RikkiTikkiTavi, on 10/15/2007, -3/+5Eureka! I'm no longer a lone voice crying in the wilderness...
    http://digg.com/politics/Calacanis_takes_ThinkProgress_to_task_for_being_bad_guests

    All kidding aside, I sincerely appreciate those who have been supporting my whisleblowing efforts on Digg!
  • Pignanelli, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4OMG BFD. I pay my right hand to jack me off every night, and my dick doesn't seem to mind one way or the other.
  • dmjarrington, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3"Abuse" is subective in this case. Diggnation means different things to different people. If right wingers were the majority on this site then right leaning articles would take the spotlight and the liberals would find another home to roost.

    Digg is a wonderful site because it has such a large hodge podge of information. If you can't get your articles up then you should accept that fact that your views are not the majority. Even with this article... your "whistleblowing" doesn't mean anything. The majority of the people on this site not only approve of the message being sent, but also believe in the same ideas wholeheartedly.

    I won't say that the manipulation of diggs is entirely appropriate in every case... however I don't necessarily think it should be persecuted against either.

    If you don't approve then all I can say is, "I'm sorry that you are offended. It's nothing personal."

    The internet is the last weapon we have against tyrannical neo conservatives bent on world destruction. Digg gives the average person the power to challenge governments. We should cherish this power and not squander it. Digg is doing wonderful things for the betterment of America because they do not discriminate against the articles posted like every other media outlet does.

    Persecution faces progressives everywhere in a country full of blind faith modern conservatism... but not here... not Digg.

    Messages are more important than political agendas. We just want to spread the message. It's not an "agenda". It's a last ditch effort to get people off the television and paying attention to where their rights just went (out the window).
    • dmjarrington, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3@ jarland

      I understand your position completely. If I thought Pat Robertson was somehow trying to influence my decisions I'd also want to slap the man silly... In fact, I want to slap him silly anyway. I hate that guy. XD

      Fair and balanced journalism is very important. It's important to see all sides of every argument. It's just that it's just so easy to discredit mainstream media sources these days seeing as how there is such a wealth of reliable information available on the internet.

      It has never been so easy to discredit the mainstream media. People tend to hate that. Especially the White House.
  • h4x0r1ng, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1230/568/1600/DiggFigs.1.png
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