Digging the Social Media Grave?
Posted on July 16, 2007
Filed Under Content, General, Media
There is a shed load of people nowadays trying to reap benefits from online social media by performing the so called social marketing which basically involves promoting content through sites like Digg.
Digg has now over a million of users reading, submitting and commenting on stories. Though the percentage of submitted stories is a smaller figure compared to the dugg and commented stories it is still a big number of stories to go through. You have to find the most unique, intriguing and exclusive ( why not shocking ) story and submit it at the right time filed under the right category. Otherwise you might be submitting stories that will never get noticed though they seem interesting to you.
This mechanism and the expansion of the social media sites and Digg in particular has made a lot of people want to cheat or game the system so that they take their piece of the traffic cake. It has always been bothering me how the same users make it to the front page every single day. Some say they have the skills and manage to predict and track stories that can be successful and popular. Skills Schmills. Does 150 equal 29? According to this screenshot it does! Wow this is a breakthrough in mathematics. No it isn’t! This is another way of cheating as I see it.
This is one big mob like community which cannot be controlled so easily and you can not actually predict what is going to be favoured and what is not. That is why you have to question everything you read and its content.
The latest engine or service, I don’t know what to call it, that is trying to game the digg system is called DiggMesh. People in forums are very skeptical about it and think that either Digg is in BIG trouble or somebody is asking for a Ban. The owner of the service reveals how he does it: “use one of the few billion web proxys on dp and create a fake digg accout its what i did”. The beta version was recently released and the people behind the scenes are looking for testers at the moment.
And this not the first attempt for cheating the Digg community. People are pushing stories to the top by applying different methods, and by doing this they are actually demolishing the Digg community and its purpose. Like for example a blogger did an experiment which involved hiring User/submitter to vote a blog story up. Basically you buy your votes on Digg. Then she received an e-mail from this same service notifying her that her story will be buried. No need to speak!
Others are building lenses on squidoo telling people what to do so that they make it to the front page of Digg. The funny thing about it is that the whole thing is written by a person who doesn’t have that great experience but he has the guts to talk about it like he know stuff.
Some other known tools for performing Digg cheats are Subvert and Profit, Collactive as well as many other known and unknown to us.
All these tools will most have a destructive effect on Digg its community and the true loyal members. We cannot stop this invasion of tools and services but we can choose to ignore them and hope that they will eventually vanish. Digg was designed as a social media platform for tech news in the first place. It is constantly expanding and the next expected category to be added for example is the picture one. If youaˆ™re running a social media site ask yourself if a new user will try to cheat and then want to get into the game. It’s quite pathetic how much time people spend on gaming a system, when they could spend the same time (or less) creating a page that is really worth being on the front page.
Comments
Leave a Reply