There are many people providing social media marketing services. We do! But what you do not get with these services is paid diggs.
Your usual “deliverable” with a social media buy is a top class article, resource, widget or tool, that is attractive and compelling enough to draw votes and links naturally.
Now, obviously there is the temptation for anyone frustrated with their performance in the social media sites to cut out all this hard work and lack of guarantee. They want to buy a front page story and don’t care how it is achieved.
Enter paid diggs.
These services have been around for a while, Digg eventually neutralizes them, but subvertandprofit.com has been getting some Twitter attention so I thought I would mention it.
$2 a vote, what are the downsides?
Well you could well lose any chances of ever getting dugg again, but if you are not getting to the popular page anyway what have you to lose? Well, your reputation I guess.
BUT, what if some competitor saw you getting in Digg all the time and wanted to end your fun? One or two small payments to get you on Diggs banning radar and boom, got you banned.
And what about blog sales? Pay for votes, inflate your traffic (and therefore sale price), leave you to clean up the mess.
Am I paranoid or do these services cause more problems than merely subverting the social bookmarking sites?
9 thoughts on “Digg Service Considered Dangerous?”
But I think that is the point. A lot of good linkbait gets buried just because a couple of someones either might not like your site or might be a “competitor”. (Though the latter is definitely the wrong way to think in the blogosphere, both reasons are commonly applied on Digg.)
I think you’re missing the point here. The algorithm will not put on the frontpage any useless article. Digg is about useful content not number of diggs. If you have a good article, it can naturally rise. A linkbait can get you visitors, links and ROI naturally.
With all new technologies like this I think there’s always a period where the bad people take their crack at ruining it for everyone.
Remember Google Adwords and the problems when it started to become more mainstream and the bad people worked out they could cost their competitors money with it. But now it isn’t much of a problem.
We just have to rely on digg to keep refining their algorithm and sorting out these problems as they come up. Is it a scary thought? Yeah. But tools like digg bring more good than bad in the end.
Jeremy,
Honestly, I think the move to non-techy categories would have been smart if they had executed it properly. But as things stand, there are categories that go days and days without any new content because of the strict digg algorithm.
In my view, they need multi-levels of popularity (sorta like Mixx). They should ensure that one new story hits the front page of each category every 5 minutes, the top stories on sub-categories then compete for main-category pop, and main categories then compete for front page pop.
In other words, Digg would be a whole lot more interesting if the sub-categories had fresher material on an ongoing basis. But for a journalist, it makes no sense to check Digg’s Hockey category if you only have one new front page Hockey story every 6 days.
Digg is done. Ever since it added so many non-techy categories and stopped catering so much to the non tech crowd it has been dead IMHO.
If I understand correctly, you are suggesting that some miscreant might be able to impersonate a competitor or enemy, buy paid Diggs for the adversary’s site, and then make sure that someone at Digg notices that the site is receiving paid Diggs, in order to get the site banned.
I am, to put it mildly, no fan of Digg. Aaron is right. When it comes to growing your e-business, or even for building up a regular following for a blog, Digg won’t do the job.
Other social venues are much better. Digg drools, StumbleUpon rules!
“what if some competitor saw you getting in Digg all the time and wanted to end your fun? One or two small payments to get you on Diggs banning radar and boom, got you banned.”
Sorry if this is a newbie question (I’m a Digg outsiderr), but, am I to understand that you can easily bribe them into banning a site for good? That seems subversive enough on its own.
I have had posts hit the front page of Digg and send me loads of traffic. But that’s about it. Some links to a sensational post, a few days of traffic and nothing else. No clicks; no RSS subscribers.
This might work well for a viral video or joke of the day site, but Digg doesn’t make sense for building a solid business.
My two cents.
Your not being paranoid… Someone will be on the losing end, and it’s not DIGG.
IMO, There is no reason to think reputation sabotage won’t work. Paypal accounts and credit cards get highjacked.
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