Digg Users Getting Paid, But Does it Matter?
Jason Calacanis reported this morning that he has received information that an not so insignificant PR firm has Digg users on the top 50 list and is compensating them. He goes on to say that the Navigators at Netscape are not being paid, of course. There has been lots of attempts to date to game Digg, some have succeeded and some have failed. There will be more of these services in the future, as Digg is a very popular site, and when you are on top everyone wants a piece of you.
Jason does go on to say that this will not kill Digg, and I agree it most likely will not be the end of Digg. He does, however, say that undermines the trust in Digg; which I do not think is true. Not only is Digg always tweaking it’s algorithm to pick up on these type of things, as Kevin has announced numerous times, but the community eventually will handle these types of things. The community acts as a better filtering system than any algorithm, as users can very easily see when a story is legit and not legit. Yes there will always be times where users collaborate, for pay or not for pay, to get a story to the front page and succeed. It is very much a cat and mouse game, but I do believe that Digg will win in the end.
The bigger question these people should be asking: is how valuable is that Digg traffic? So your story gets to the homepage, and you get a huge traffic boost and most likely some crashed servers that comes with an angry web host. Jason Clarke has an interesting read, on why this might not be as good as everyone imagines it is. And I agree, that this might be the doom of Digg, but that’s a big might and I would hate to see it happen.
The bottom line, is these schemes and ways to trick the system will always be around, but I am confident that Digg will always be there to advance the system to limit the success rate. As far as Netscape not having paid users, well I am not sure that Jason can confirm that, as it might be on a much lower level but it still may exist. In addition, Netscape doesn’t nearly have the name brand recognition that Digg does. Putting numbers aside, Digg is practically a household name in the tech community. Kevin and Alex have done a great job of helping that cause with their very popular podcast Diggnation that was mimicked on a Saturday Night Live skit. Their T shirt was even in an IBM ad. Netscape is not nearly as popular with the kids as Digg is, so naturally when some outsiders want to “get in” with what the cool kids are doing, they are going to get directed toward what most popular. It’s the difference between Google and Yahoo, and all the cool kids are using Google!
