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Comment by noahth | Hacker News Reader

pretty sure the headline here should say "Extremist group succeeds in gaming Digg"

or "one of the many groups gaming digg has been caught"

This. Others game social media sites to drive traffic to sites that profit them. This is the first I've heard of people doing it for political reasons though.

Happens here too. If you've ever wondered how a certain austrian entrepreneur always manages to garner enough votes to put him on the front page even when the material doesn't support it...

No, but I often wonder how a thinly veiled personal attack gets multiple upvotes.

In this case, it's probably because I'm expressing a frustration that many people share. It's an unfortunate fact that the success of HN as a social news site has made the attention stream it can direct valuable enough to be a target of manipulation. That some people are engaging in this sort of manipulation is indubitable. That I vented my frustration with one of the more egregious examples is a breach of decorum for which I apologise.

Why do you think so many apple article makes it to the front page? What do they get out of it?

It think that some of the articles with negative news about Apple (the ones making a fuss over fairly minor things), be be designed to cause ripples in the stock price. Things won't always be as obvious as MS-paid people trying to discredit Linux. Even rumors that aren't true may cause some reaction that can be exploited. I think there are many posts on many site for many topics that have ulterior motives. If you think of any situation where someone wishes to get or deny some kind of advantage, there's the potential for cyber-warfare. It can happen at any level, it can be powerful even when not fully understood. Look at kids driving other kids to suicide.

Influencing people is power. Why do you think the diversity in ownership of U.S. broadcasters has become so eroded? There's more to it than lack of competition.

I am certain a left leaning group is doing the same thing. Think moveon.org (in a different medium). They just negate each others extreme views.

You may be certain, but so far a year long undercover investigation has yet to prove there is an elite cabal of liberals desperately manipulating information in an attempt to skew towards their viewpoint.

Or, perhaps, the feeling that conservative content is underrepresented is because of something more benign -- maybe more liberals visit Digg than conservatives?

"but so far a year long undercover investigation has yet to prove there is an elite cabal of liberals desperately manipulating information in an attempt to skew towards their viewpoint."

That's just because their better at it than the Cons. Cue music from the Twilight Zone....

A yearlong investigation to uncover a voting ring on Digg isn't impressive, it's bloody incompetence. It shouldn't have taken more than a week, if that. I left Digg, gosh, three, four years ago now, because it was pretty obvious even then that Digg was basically just a collection of voting cabals of various levels of interconnectedness. People were writing articles about it and stuff. People were writing how-to articles, which channels on IRC and how to set up your own IRC-based rings.

Talking about how a conservative group briefly has the upper hand is like observing which pig has briefly risen to the top of the muck pile. Don't worry, I'm sure counter-conservatives will be rallying behind this story to overpower them in another iteration of the endlessly-boring cycle and I look forward to reading about how it singlehandedly proves liberalism is a cabalistic conspiracy on a wide collection of right-leaning sites run by the sort of people who still think Digg votes matter.

Nah, the "mainstream media" won't report the liberals doing it. ;)

I think this would be the most interesting problem a social media site would have to solve once it got traction.

So given that it was an obvious problem 3-4 years ago, do you think it might be possible that Digg, Inc. might have recognized the problem and done something about it?

And that this whole right-wing conspiracy might amount to a bunch of people pumping up their egos while basically spinning their wheels?

Just sayin'...

They did "stuff", but ultimately Digg's philosophy limits what they can actually do. They're all about "power to the people", and in an online voting context that leads directly to voting cliques, as inevitably as Duverger's law leads to two major parties. You can't fix the cliques without also destroying power-to-the-people. To Digg's credit, they've tried to be true to their philosophy. Unfortunately, it's not possible.

In fact Digg and a couple of other technologies taught me the foolishness of "power to the people". You don't want to democratize every site on the internet. You want to allow a million flowers to bloom, everyone to have their say but in their own space that they control. This produces a much healthier environment. It pisses off some people that their soapbox doesn't grow as large as they believe it should by virtue of their obvious innate greatness, but I've come to see this as a feature, not a bug.

You're speaking nonsense. "Power to the people" is a completely empty PR phrase at Digg.

No, power to the people as a philosophically-organizing principle was quite popular around the time Digg was created. The idea is that the big problem with the world is that the control is all in the hands of $WRONG_GROUP and the correct solution is just to democratically hand all the power out to your userbase and it'll all just magically work because you've solved the underlying problem.

The error of this thinking was the downfall of Digg, and for another example, Third Voice. Also, numerous blog owners initially fell for the idea that removing comments from their site is "censorship" on par with how evil it is when governments do it, and this idea is still current, even though it's nothing more than a recipe for getting destroyed by trolls after a certain critical mass is obtained. Like I said, the right answer is something else entirely. It's a recurring cycle on the Internet; somebody decides power-to-the-people is the way to go, the problems become manifest, the community takes action to contain the damage or simply flames out entirely, and some idealistic group of people get pissed off, declare that the people are now powerless and it's time for power to the people, starting the cycle over again. I've watched at least 3 iterations of this over the past 10 years. We're due for another "power to the people" explosion which right now is most likely to manifest in the distributed-Facebook community.

I was there (check the profile). "Power to the People" was entirely a marketing/PR construct.

I don't think they cancel each other out. Digg has an extremely conservative bias. Half the stories on the front page are basically "Global Warming Is A Hoax Because Jesus Wouldn't Let That Happen"

Yeah as a user since 2007, it went noticeably conservative in the last year or so (which is when many of us moved to Reddit). And it's not just conservative leaning but really pointed partisan stuff.

I hope they can figure out a way to solve this sort of thing going forward. And I'm curious if their choice of either digg/bury instead of upvote/downvote makes it easier to game. I believe it does, as these folks haven't been able to do the same with reddit. I'm not sure, but I believe a story is gone once it gets a certain number of "buries" whereas on reddit a story with a lot of downvotes can be easily resurrected by upvotes. (though I could be wrong about this?)

People tend to self-segregate in real life. It makes sense that it should happen on the Internet, too.

Agreed, but I think this is a little beyond self-segration. If they just wanted to self-segregate, they'd find stories they agree with and digg them up, but extending that to also ruin other people's discussion is another thing. They are gathering with the explicit goal of drowning out other voices outside of their self-segregated group.

Perhaps another reason reddit isn't as susceptible is that it allows for user-created subreddits where like-minded folks can form such hives.

Happens in real-life. Look at how many news stories you see about some speaker coming to a college and being shouted down (or food being thrown at them) so they can't speak.

A long time ago I read an interview with Charlton Heston. He said during the filming of Planet of the Apes, the costumes took so long to put on and take off that they left them on during lunch. One day he looked around and realized: all the humans were sitting together, all the gorillas were sitting together, all the orangutans...

Well the main reddits have a sharp liberal bias. When people from other subreddits who don't conform to this view speak up they tend to get smacked down pretty hard and quick.

I think it's both Liberal and Libertarian. And Ron Paul is quite popular there.

Also, there's still a difference between something that happens there and what the Digg Patriots are doing in that they are conspiring to game the system. There's no such equivalent thing going on at Reddit.

Edit: I think we see the natural split of progressive v. libertarian on reddit, and both parties are represented very well. Perhaps there's not a neo-conservative/fox news voice, but I would not be quick to blame that on some sort of conspiracy as much as I would on the difficulty one has reasoning with these sorts of extremists. They are not there to engage in dialog as much as they are there to poison it.

> There's no such equivalent thing going on at Reddit.

As far as we know.

See, that's what I get for not checking Digg in years. I remember when I first tried reading it--must have been 2006/2007--I was finding that every single comment that got downvoted to oblivion on a political discussion... was one putting forward a conservative opinion. I quickly gave it up as another instance of Internet Liberal Hivemind.

Too bad I couldn't have caught it sometime between the swing from Liberal Hivemind to Conservative Cabal, it might have been worth reading.

False equivalence. Because there happen to be two parties in the US does not mean there have to be two groups trying to censor Digg. Also leftists could never agree to this shit, we're not organized (pun intended).

You don't need organization to get leftist censorship, you just need a majority (which seems to be the case in most general forums or news sites). Then, a natural self-righteous knee-jerk on the part of every reader gets conservatively-oriented things voted/shouted down posthaste. Surely you've seen an instance on the Internet where somebody says something which may be purely sane and reasonable, only to be followed up by 30 posts of "GOD, WHAT AN IDIOT", "I hate rethuglicans!", and "See, this proves how stupid Americans are, go eat a cheeseburger and go to church!"

Actually... I just realized that both sides tend to "prove" their points with lots of ad hominem. It's just that the ad hominem coming from liberals tends to be a touch better spelled; I think the smart conservatives quickly learn to keep their heads down, so only the dumb ones try to step out into the shit-storm.

See, this is why people are stupid in this country.

Obama: "I'm trying to fix healthcare" Republicans: "He's trying to kill your grandmother"

Washington Post: "Obama, Republicans disagree over whether healthcare plan will mandate euthanasia"

This is the most succinct summary of the healthcare debate I've seen.

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