digg

Yesterday TC ran a story about how diggers were upset about yahoo using digg like features to enhance customer feedback. Today on Digg I saw a link to a cNet article about Microsoft creating digg like sites in other countries.

Of course diggers (or as I call them Diggiots) are overreacting, because that’s what they do. But really, I hope Digg does get pushed out of the market, or at least out of the mainstream. Not because of the service it offers, but because of its user base. I guess if you’re looking for someone to correct your spelling because they don’t have a valid argument to make, you can always go with Digg. But if you’re looking for an actual meaningful online conversation / intelligent debate, stay the hell away from Digg.

Digg’s downfall this year won’t be completely from gamers, it will also be from the users. How do you prevent this? Cater to a different user base, I think that’s what MSFT and other companies that are supposedly creating Digg clones are doing… and in the end I think they’ll be better for it.

I was asked by Josh Amer to do a guest post. I run, amongst other businesses, iBegin, a local search engine. Right now only in Canada, it will soon be expanding into the US.

There is a lovely little buzz going on about user-generated content. Tired webmasters no longer need to work and write quality content - nay, let the users carry that burden. After all, they get something out of it… don’t they?

Many of them are beholden to the idea that (in general), users are good. If there is one bad user, there are ten others to stop the vagabond. Pretty grand isn’t it?

Alas, two major holes crop up:

1. Often times, the reporting user is taken at face value. The algorithm seems to be rather simple. Every time a user-generated entry is reported as spam, internally the system does this: +1 spam_report. If spam_report > 5 (5 people have reported this as spam), hold or delete. It seems while provisions were made for malignant contributors, there were no provisions made for malignant ‘helpers’. To be honest, I have not seen a single website where this simplistic approach is not taken. This even works on Digg: observe the cloud view of upcoming stories. In my own random testing, it took roughly 5 ‘this is lame’ for the bottom stories, 7 ‘this is lame’ for the middling stories, and 9 ‘this is lame’ for top stories. Frontpage stories took roughly 11-13 ‘this is lame’. I have enough employees to neuter almost any story. The former #1 user P9 had this done to him - every single story he submitted was immediately buried. Eventually he ‘quit’ - in really he had been neutered and could make no impact on the site. With the stakes higher as Digg becomes more popular, suppressing a competitor’s story becomes rather useful. (NOTE: I only buried spam/duplicate stories.)

A few sites are starting to create UserRank values, akin to Google’s PageRank. The thinking is reasonable - if we know the ‘quality’ of a user, we can know if his/her contributions (be it new submissions, reports, etc) are valuable or not. Noble, but this leads into point #2 …

2. How do you know a user really is a user? In order to understand the challenges faced by user-driven websites, I have started delving into some blackhat SEO (purely research). Suffice to say, sites like Digg and Reddit are already being heavily abused. Image captchas and so forth? All you need is a list of open proxies, a pinch of cURL, a dash of OCR software, mix well, and you have an automated system to run roughshod over any of the existing ’social’ systems. Just generate some rules and the system can be digging or redditting or bookmarking within an hour. And email validation? All you need to do is pipe all the email addresses to a single script and simply fetch the URL contained within. Easy as pie.

The processing power required to really weed out ‘networks’ of users is immense. Digg has tried to do this for submissions (but not for reports) - if you often digg the same user’s stories, eventually your digg counts less. Of course, in reality this only works for real users. An automated system will have a unique IP (courtesy of proxies), a unique signup name (just take a list of first+last names, and concatenate them together with two random numbers at the end), and a unique ‘voting’ history (all votes are randomized). There is simply no way to know that all these (fake) users are interlinked.

The above two points are very important as about a month ago I set out to make user-driven politics website (coming soon at Wing Politics. Having already
seen how ugly Digg’s political section got, it was obvious to battle #1 I needed a UserRank system. Yet I also had #2 to contend with.

The answer was actually quite simple. A major site was already doing it, the cost was low, and its only downside was it did require some trust.

With that in mind, I make a bold prediction:

As user-driven websites become increasingly manipulated (in more and more sophisticated manners), they will have to start ‘validating’ that a user exists. The preferred choice of validation will be by sending a validation code an SMS to a user’s cellphone

Google’s GMail is already doing this - the amount of spam coming from an @gmail.com address is almost nil. People who contribute to such sites heavily skew towards technophile/younger demographic - highly likely to have a cellphone. The cost, both time and monetary, would be rather significant for an abuser to gain enough trusted user accounts. The cost of sending an SMS is not very high, and as long as the user can be convinced that their cellphone # will not be used for any spam/marketing purposes, you have a solid way of ensuring the uniqueness of a user.

This post turned out to be rather lengthy, but I wanted to elucidate on the over reliance (and implicit trust) users have in most web 2.0 sites. I am also sure as exploits become more commonplace the solution I have proposed will become much more common.

It’s no secret that Digg and Facebook - two of the most publicized social sites - have faced backlash from some users as of late. Digg is angering only a few, while facebook has angered the masses. The problem is that Digg gets it strength from a few and FB gets its strength from those mind-numb masses. We’ve all seen the numbers of FB users joining the ‘new FB sucks’ groups, I was invited to join one myself (and no I didn’t join), and it seems that most of the users are joining the groups the same way that they joined FB… without any real thought.

The FB situation is bleak, many say that 400,000 is just a drop in the bucket, but enough wrong drops and 100’s of thousands turn into millions. And I don’t care who you are, no one likes to lose 100s of thousands of users. [Palopia are you listening - launch NOW!] To make matters worse, the Facebook blog has essentially told users, ‘you don’t like it, and we don’t care.’ That may not be what the blog post was going for but that’s certainly how it comes off. Starting the post with Calm Down, is enough to turn most users off - turn down the arrogance or lose your base. Remember you’re trying to flip a site for $2B based on the strength of the network, lose the network and you lose everything. Am I overreacting, yes, but so are all of the users that are joining the anti-FB groups. Who wants to buy a product that has an ever growing chunk of users pledging their hatred for the product? Either look confident and lose your users or look like you care about those users and re-gain their loyalty. I don’t know how long I’ve been hearing about how loyal of a user base the FB users are (based on how often they visit the site) - that loyalty only lasts as long as you give them what they want. Sure the numbers have been good in the past few days - but that’s similar to the Digg effect, people are going just to see what the buzz is about. Speaking of Digg effect…

Digg on the other hand is in great shape. Get rid of the users that are gaming the system and the system gets better. I applaud the efforts. I’ve recently had to put in some extra security that prevents users from gaming Lopico and I couldn’t be happier with the results. Digg is for the masses, when it starts being about a few you have to change. The confusion is with the power users that thought that they could game Digg forever, and that think that there aren’t users #20-30 who would love to take their spot as the highest ranked Digg users. This is probably the first positive Digg post I’ve done in a while, because this is the first move I’ve seen from Digg in a while that gets them closer to what they claim to be - socially driven news made by the masses.

Digg Blog: Digg Friends
Facebook Blog: Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.

- J.D. Amer is guy from akron who is about to launch motask.com

Great post by Eric Sink on what I’ll call ‘the difference between marketing and being loud.’ The problem with it as I see it, is the problem that Digg may run into. The gist of the post is that if you build a great product for a small group the group will talk, and before long you’ll have more buzz than you know what to do with - that’s pretty much what happened to Digg / Del.icio.us / etc.

The problem with Digg (relating to the post I pointed to yesterday) is that the group has gotten too defensive. It’s nearly impossible to get into the Digg Elite. If I wanted to become a Digg fanatic I don’t know that I could… it would take far too much effort to become one of the Digg elite (a digger that can get a 5 digg story on the homepage). To me Digg is almost a closed network.

Designing for a few is great, but make sure that the community is open to newcomers. Maybe this is part of the reason that Digg expanded beyond tech. Unfortunately, the same going to keep happening with each topic.

It’s an interesting problem and one that I don’t think has a perfect answer yet… Make it easy for newbies, but reward the long time users - someone will figure it out.

J.D. Amer is a guy that dreams bigger and thinks smaller everyday. — I’m going to start adding a signature to every post, here’s why.

I put Lopico on Digg today - Digg it if you like. Thanks!

I try not to look at Digg on the weekends, mainly because I don’t care what some eight year old found on google maps this week.  On the weekends the tech news is usually meager - as it should be, it is the weekend - but I happened to look at Digg on Saturday and saw the MySpace messenger “story.”  Personally, I agree with Om on this; I think that this is a great opportunity, not only for MySpace but other Social Networks as well. I also think that it’s about time the IM was shaken up. The only reason I still use AIM is because I can’t force all of my friends to jump to a different messenger service, but if the messenger automatically pulled all of my friends from the network, then we all instantly have a new tool and I can leave AIM with the rest of AOL.

But, more striking to me than the stories on Digg lately, are the comments.  If Yahoo! ever was in talks with Digg, it’s lucky it broke off the talks.  Digg now seems to be for junior high students.

Intrigued by the MySpace story, I decided to read the comments. Most were either saying: “what do we need another instant messenger for?” or “oh no myspace.”  So I posted along the lines of: “I’m guessing half of you that are saying that we don’t need a new instant messenger are the same people that applauded Google’s instant messenger.”  Here’s the response that I got:

Google is probably the best company involved with computers.
If they had gone public earlier, and had money to release googletalk,
It would be better and have more users than aim now

After reading this, I decided I will no longer use Digg.  It’s become too childish.  I’m just going to use memeorandum and continue to read the handful of blogs that I need to, to get all of the important info on my own. Digg is coming off of my essential links and memeorandum will replace it.  It’s really too bad, it’s a great concept, but now it’s in the wrong hands.