Digg caught red handed faking ad votes? | Hacker News Reader

Digg caught red handed faking ad votes?

catalyticnarrative.blogspot.com

6 pointskapauldo14 comments

Are you sure this isn't just due to load balancing? You might be hitting a different node everytime, they probably don't sync too quickly, and with the amount of traffic digg gets, the numbers could easily vary by that much in a fairly short period of time.

Assuming malice seems premature.

It should be relatively easy to prove... Poll the results for ~1 hour for all (or front page only) stories. Generate proper statistics for the speed of change for each entry (stddev per article per each phase - raise, sustain, fall). If all ads jump as much as this sample, it would be quite easy to show the difference.

Even a side-by-side graph of votes for articles and for ads should show a if anything strange is going on. But showing a sample of size == 1 is more or less pointless.

I literally haven't been to digg ever since discovering HN oh so long ago...

The open, friendly, transparent process here is a very welcome relief from the ongoing war between users and moderators, the latter of which are constantly engaged in silently burying articles as they're submitted, blacklisting sites just because users submit their own content, and banning users for no good reason.

Thank god for HN :)

Are you sure you don't have the two sites confused? Moderators play a lot larger role on HN than they do on Digg, which is one of the reasons this site is better (though it also creates the potential for it to be a lot worse).

I'm not against moderation. Read my post again clearly: it's the transparent moderation that rocks.

I often click on HN stories through RSS to find the link "[dead]" with no explanation or reason why.

Those actually have subtly different titles (except for no. 1 and no. 3, which both have the same number of diggs). Looks to me like they just have multiple ad units for any given advertiser.

Does it really matter if they're forging the digg count for the ads? Please forgive my ignorance as I am not a frequent user of that website, but the ads aren't things that naturally get put on the page, are they? The amount of "diggs" that an ad has is irrelevant to its placement, no?

So...who cares? This is a bit like getting angry about a diner claiming that their soup is "famous".

are there anyone who cares about digg these days?

Their traffic suggests that there are quite a few people that do.

could you document that traffic?

No, sadly, I cannot. My suggestion would be to visit the website. If you do, it is pretty obvious that they're getting quite a bit of traffic.

In what sense does this prove that they are receiving quite a bit of traffic? I see one article, http://digg.com/linux_unix/Ubuntu_9_10_Karmic_Koala_released got 1512 users, which means we have proved that digg.com got at least 1512 unique users. Granted, that this is not a fixed voting system of course. Secondly, how do I quantify 'quite a bit'? I think we can settle to say that you got no proof nor documentation that shows us the amount of traffic that digg actually got.

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