I’ve got a bad reputation
Today my Wired article about “crowdhacking” went online, along with an investigative article I did for Wired News about how I paid people on Digg.com to “digg” an incredibly stupid blog I whipped up. Both articles focus on how easy it is to manipulate crowds online, especially when it comes to sites like eBay or Digg where we place trust in individuals based on how many other people have trusted their opinions.
Needless to say, my article on manipulating Digg has been dugg many thousands of times. Already, critics are saying that Wired did this story because Wired News owner CondeNet also owns Reddit, a small company that competes with Digg. This is absolutely not the case. I actually did extensive interviews with the founder of Reddit, and even spoke briefly to the one person who had ever successfully “gamed” Reddit. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the final cut in the magazine story for two reasons: 1. The person who gamed Reddit was already a top contributor even without gaming, so he was only gaming it for amusement (not a particularly interesting story); and 2. Reddit, as cool as it is, is nowhere near as popular as Digg and therefore there are few incentives for people to game it. So if we’d included Reddit in my original article, it might have made us look like we were promoting a Wired property and claiming it had the same influence as Digg, which it simply doesn’t.
So why did we target Digg and not Reddit in the Wired News piece? Again, the answer is simple. Digg is so big that an entire industry has sprung up around gaming it, and therefore I could hire a company that would pay people to digg my story. There is no such comparable industry or company that will game Reddit. Again, I love Reddit and I think it’s very cool — but writing about it in this context would have been like comparing apples and oranges.
Anyway, back to crowdhacking. Why is it so easy to manipulate crowds online? One theory is that people are easily swayed by crowd opinions, and so they jump on the bandwagon and “digg” a story on Digg just because other people have done it. (That’s why my scheme to buy diggs worked — once I had enough paid diggs, people thought it was popular and they started digging it too). Another theory, which holds more for eBay-style sites, is that people won’t give negative feedback to sellers on eBay because they fear reprisals. Thus the crowd inflates everyone’s reputation on eBay. Several weeks ago, I wrote my column about this issue, focusing on a company called The Gorb which is trying to solve reputation inflation by building more anonymity into reputation systems.
March 1st, 2007 at 5:38 pm
i kinda like the boring blog, tho, in an ironic way.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:02 am
First of all, great blog. As for Digg, you have only scratched the surface. Digg is almost completely controlled by a few groups of top users who use bots to Digg each others’ stories. I witnessed this firsthand, because, as part of my research, I attempted an experiment to game Digg, and succeeded tremendously. By making the right friends on Digg and digging the stories they submitted religiously, I was able to bruteforce my way in to the circle of top users(I was in the top 200 at the end of my experiment, and was easily getting 1-3 stories to the front page evry single day). The level of corruption on Digg, which I experienced firsthand to my benefit, was ridiculous. It got to the point where every story I submitted got 15-20 diggs, no matter how stupid or inane(I tried very hard to submit the worst stories with the worst titles possible by the end, making your crowd blog look like the collected works of Shakespeare by comparison). It was ridiculous as I watched the same people digg every single thing their friends submitted. With stories from my own blog that did not get to the front page, the number of diggs was invariably greater than the number of hits to that story from digg, meaning people dugg before clicking. I have no doubt that marketing companies and certain bloggers are exploting this to their advantage.
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:17 am
Illegitimi non carborundum
March 2nd, 2007 at 7:18 am
[...] March 2, 2007 at 3:15 pm · Filed under Uncategorized Wired.com Writer Defends Her Article on Digg Already, critics are saying that Wired did this story because Wired News owner CondeNet also owns Reddit, a small company that competes with Digg. This is absolutely not the case. I actually did extensive interviews with the founder of Reddit, and even spoke briefly to the one person who had ever successfully “gamed†Reddit.[news] [technology] [industry news] [...]
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:14 am
[...] In the case of Wired/Reddit/Conde Nast Vs Digg story, I thought it was very sad that many bloggers including the highly respected Michael Arrington would even dare to question the integrity of a respected publication such as Wired. [...]
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:29 am
Hi
A word of warning. This story has 40 diggs so any second now a lot of users from Digg will be coming who I can assure you, won’t have nice things to say.
I for one believe you did nothing wrong (see trackback above) and it’s sad that people would question your and Wired’s journalistic integrity.
Keep your head up!
EB
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:22 pm
[...] I’ve got a bad reputation Wired writer defends Digg article. (tags: digg social_media) [...]
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:10 pm
I’m convinced that what you did and wrote about was a much needed wake up call for Digg’s administration. They have been walking around the past few weeks with the idea that they fixed everything, which is simply not the case. Digg is still very much game-able, which you have proven.
March 5th, 2007 at 8:39 am
[...] Newitz Slaps Back Wired writer, Annalee Newitz, responds to Arrington’s claims with a combination at Wired (sharing her first death threat from Mike’s prodding) and Techsploitation. [...]
April 27th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
I’m definately not a top user at digg. but i’m a faithful user, and I occasionally do make the front page, which is very exciting when I do hit it. So I truly believe you are wrong in your point that only a few top users control digg….Stop all this digg hating!!!!
April 30th, 2007 at 8:02 am
You’ve been slashdotted :
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/04/30/1415239.shtml
Now, the question that I have is : why did it take over a month for them to notice this?