Outing Digg

December 13th, 2006

Digg Somedays the Web world seems so batty you just have to take a step back and laugh at it. Today Jason Calacanis is on a quest to prove that people are “gaming digg,” this time in the form of advertising firms paying top diggers to submit / digg particular stories, ones promoting particular companies as part of a marketing campaign.

Calacanis is so convinced that this is happening, he’s willing to pay any digger that shows some proof (in the form of PR firm’s emails, offers of payment, or bribes) $100. He vows to keep all the user’s information confidential.

It seems somewhat ironic that he wants to pay a digger for evidence of someone else paying a digger to do something, and thinking that he’s on the up-and-up, but oh well.

Here’s one potential example of sneaky digging activity.

Anyhow, my two cents is that I don’t completely get why an ad firm would want to pay diggers for a high profile on digg. Any company that’s solely relying on digg to get their word out has a serious problem. The people in digg are notoriously anti-corporate and liberal, and anything reeking of corporate shill-itude would leave a bad taste in their mouths.

Second, it’s not that freaking hard to submit a story. If there’s anything interesting backing it up, it will get dugg. If you submit an article promoting your company and it doesn’t get much interest, then your company is probably just not very interesting to the digg demographic. Sorry.

I’ve submitted some of my own stuff from this blog and gotten barely a blip of activity - so I concentrate on writing better articles. But if your immediate response to a lack of diggs is, well, I’ll ask (or pay) people to digg my articles and then my site will become awesome - you have an ego problem.

I’m going to take the realist viewpoint and say that whenever there’s a system where money is to be made, there will be bribery, sneaky dealings, and people saying or doing certain things just because they want to get paid.

In the long run, one has to just have faith that the “wisdom of crowds” will win out, or the people who compromise their values will end up damaging their reputations in the long run - as the truth has a funny way of emerging, even in the absence of a finder’s fee from a former AOL employee.

A good example of this eventual justice is how at present, “JetNumbers Inc.” and the brilliant Business Development Manager who thought it would be a cool idea to hit up diggers to promote his company on the sly, are now looking worst of all.

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