How to Stop Digg-cheating, Forever 217
Before getting to that though, what's at stake? The revelation that Digg could be trivially manipulated did not cause the site to be overrun with bogus stories all at once -- most of the links on the front page still look interesting. Newitz said that her story, which was deliberately chosen to be as lame as possible, got buried by users soon after it hit the front page, which is how Digg cleans spam stories out of the system. However, she also said that in the time that the story was on the front page, the story got about 35,000 hits, whereupon her server crashed and the traffic was thereafter divided with two other mirror sites; presumably if the server had stayed up, she would have gotten about 100,000 hits, all for an initial expenditure of $100, which is orders of magnitude cheaper than buying advertising any other way. (If she had done the same thing with a good story instead of a deliberately lame one, presumably the traffic gains resulting from word-of-mouth and repeat visitors would have been even higher.) As long as the benefits outweigh the cost, more and more unscrupulous users are likely to pay for such services, and since the service provided by User/Submitter is easy to copy, probably similar services will spring up to drive the price down even further. If nothing changes, then eventually sites like Digg and reddit will be flooded with nothing but paid stories. Most of the stories on the front page will probably still be interesting (why would you pay to promote a link, unless it was good enough to draw repeat visitors and get the most value for your money?), but everybody who didn't pay for votes would eventually get crowded out.
One Good Samaritan, Jim Messenger, managed to shut down one Digg manipulation service called Spike The Vote, by buying it out (for a paltry $1,275 - they must have wanted to get out fast) and then turning over to Digg. He warned people that the moral was: Don't sign up for Digg manipulation services, since Digg might get your information from them and then you'll be banned. Actually, I think the moral is simpler: if you're going to try anything like that, do it from a throwaway account that you don't care about losing if you get caught. (Or, only sign up with manipulation services which publish a privacy policy promising never to share your information, especially not with sites like Digg. Then if Digg buys them out, then the site has violated their privacy policy and Digg as the new owner inherits the liability for that, so you can sue them, right?) But as the idea spreads, it will probably become impractical to play whack-a-mole by shutting down manipulation services as they keep springing up. Any time the cost of providing a service (clicking on a few buttons) is small compared to the benefits of receiving the service (100,000 hits in 24 hours), a market will exist for it one way or another, whether you're talking about drug-smuggling, prostitution, or selling Digg votes.
However, I think there's a way to fix it, and here it is. Have you ever seen people put a link in their profile to their HotOrNot picture, saying "Go here and vote me a 10!!"? Similar to the people who send links to their friends and say, "I just posted this, please Digg this for me!" The difference is that on HotOrNot, it doesn't work. On HotOrNot, you can cast votes for a picture in one of two ways. The first way is to go directly to the URL for someone's picture; the second way is to load the front page, where a random picture from the database is selected at random, and vote for whatever picture comes up. The catch is that the votes that you cast by going directly to someone's picture, are simply ignored in calculating the average score for that photo. The only votes that are counted are the votes cast for random pictures displayed on the front page. So if you want to manipulate the voting for your own photo, you'd have to load the front page hundreds of thousands of times waiting for your own picture to come up repeatedly, which is hard to do without being detected.
To enable an algorithm like this on Digg and reddit, the sites could present users with a sidebar box that displays random stories from the pool of recent submissions. (reddit already has a serendipity feature that users can use to select a random story from the available pool, which could be leveraged for this purpose.) Once a story has collected, say, 100 votes -- or whatever number is considered sufficient to provide a representative random sample of how the story appeals to people -- then on that basis the story can either be buried or promoted to the top, where it would be seen by, say, 100,000 people. The elegance of this system is that bad content would only be seen by 100 people on average before it's buried, whereas good content would be seen by all the 100,000 people who view it on the front page, so the average user sees 1,000 pieces of good content for every 1 piece of crap. Even if 75% of users ignore the random story box completely, that just means you have to display it to 400 users instead of 100 before you have enough data points for a good random sample.
I suggested essentially the same algorithm for how an open-source search engine could work without being vulnerable to gaming even by those who understood all of its inner workings. The main difference, of course, is that Digg and reddit actually exist now. Digg declined to comment on the possible merits of such an algorithm; reddit's Steve Huffman said that the idea sounded interesting, although even if the idea got full buy-in, naturally any proposed change would take a long time to bring to fruition.
But it seems that an algorithm similar to this one would be the only way to prevent cheating on sites like Digg that sort content based on user votes. So it's ironic that HotOrNot, the only site I know of that is using a variation of this algorithm and hence is probably the most secure against cheating, is also the one where cheating is least likely to be a problem. Getting a high placement on Digg might enable you to make some money, but getting a highly rated picture on HotOrNot isn't going to make you rich (unless it helps you meet a millionaire who is using the site to find his third wife). Also, making HotOrNot meritocratic doesn't give people an incentive to improve the "content" that they submit, because up to the limits of what can be done with hair and wardrobe, you can't make yourself that much more attractive. With Digg and reddit, on the other hand, I might work harder at submitting a good story, if I knew that it worked in a perfectly meritocratic fashion that pushed good stories right to the top.
If you do this, you don't need any of the other countermeasures listed in Annalee Newitz's follow-up piece "Herding the Mob", such as analyzing user account history for suspicious behavior. As long as most users in the system are legitimate, most of the users in your random sample will be legitimate as well, and their voting will be representative of what most of the community would think. A story could also get a high score within a specific sub-area of the site like the sports page, but kept off of the main site front page, if the story got a high score from a random sampling of sports-oriented users but a low score from a sample of everyone else.
You could even sub-divide the topical areas further, down to a level of granularity like "Would Barack Obama make a good president?" A site called Helium is currently trying something like this -- users can submit essays on subjects like "Racial inequality or oppression: Do they truly exist in todays society?", and vote on how to rank other essays against each other. The voting works on the random selection principle that I'm advocating here -- users are presented with a pair of randomly chosen essays from a given category (not necessarily the same category for which you submitted an essay) and told to vote for the better one, so there's no way to tell all your friends to go to the link for your essay and give it a high rating. The main limitation though is that while the votes can push you to the top of a particular sub-category, that won't cause your article to "break out" and get to the front page of the site -- Helium says that those front-page articles are chosen at random by employees from the among those articles that are highly rated within their narrow category, so just being good is not enough. And if you want to write something that doesn't fit into any existing categories, you have to create a new category for your essay like I did, which will then be a category containing one essay that nobody else ever sees. Perhaps both of these limitations could be overcome by adding the option to rate randomly selected essays on a scale of 1 to 10 -- thus providing a way to rate essays that exist alone in their own category, and also a way to find the best essays across the entire site, rated against each other.
If Digg or reddit adopts a model that uses the random-voter-selection method, then there's the issue of how to handle the votes cast by users under the current system -- the ones who go to a story link and click "digg it", which is what makes the existing system vulnerable to gaming. Digg could do what HotOrNot does, and just ignore those votes outright, but users would probably view this as deceptive. Perhaps Digg could say that votes cast by self-selected users (the ones who go straight to the story link) are counted along with votes from randomly-selected users, unless the average of the self-selected votes is significantly different from the average from the randomly-selected votes, in which case the self-selected votes are ignored. Hopefully this would satisfy most users and preserve the "community" feel of the site, and only a spoilsport would point out that counting the self-selected votes only if they agree with the randomly-selected votes, is exactly the same thing as ignoring the self-selected votes entirely.
I asked the owner of User/Submitter what he thought about this. He was willing to talk with surprising candor (except about things like his real name) and spoke as if he'd like nothing better than for Digg to make changes to their service that would block his system from working. To both Annalee Newitz and me, he said, "We find it interesting that Digg still allows anybody to view any user's diggs. By way of this 'feature,' User/Submitter is able to verify that our users actually digg the stories they're given. Without this feature, Digg users are given complete digging privacy, and User/Submitter cannot exist." Some have expressed skepticism that the Digg cheaters really want Digg to fix the problem. But as a security tester, I can understand that mentality. If you report a problem, and a company doesn't fix it, eventually you get tempted to publicize the problem to draw attention to it. And if they still don't fix it, and it's a fairly benign security hole that merely enables some pranksters to get some undeserved attention, why not build a service around exploiting the hole, if will highlight the problem and encourage it to get fixed?
So I'm going to go out on a limb and say the U/S guy sincerely wants Digg to be more secure. However I disagree with him about his proposed fix, that of hiding a user's digg history. First of all, it won't stop anyone who creates a multitude of accounts all under their control -- you can use Tor to make it appear that you're coming from many different IP addresses, and build up a history of "legitimate" votes before using your votes to push sites deliberately. (Be sure to use different browsers, or vary your User-Agent header if you know how to do that, so that a series of votes from identical browser types doesn't give you away.) If your service does work by paying other users to cast votes, then you could still audit whether they're casting their votes honestly -- for example, create a test story, use 5 sockpuppet accounts to digg it 5 times, then tell your confederate to digg it. If the number of diggs doesn't go up to 6, then you know they're not honoring their end of the deal, and kick them out of the system. As long as most confederates think there might be some chance of getting caught if they don't play along, most of them would probably cast the votes that they were paid for, since it costs them nothing to do so and they wouldn't want to jeopardize their stream of easy money.
I asked the owner of User/Submitter if his service could defeat the random-sampling algorithm I described. "It would slow down our service," he answered, "but certainly wouldn't eliminate it because eventually a U/S User will have an opportunity to vote on a U/S Submission by way of chance." But I don't see how this would beat the algorithm -- some U/S voters would still get to vote on the story, but as long as there are far more legitimate voters than U/S voters, then a random sampling will almost always contain far more legitimate voters. The U/S owner also said, "Randomized voting privileges would be unnecessarily confusing, frustrating, and fragmenting. Not to forget: unfair and undemocratic." Well, you could keep it from being "confusing" or "frustrating" by keeping the existing interface (with the possible addition of a randomly-selected-story box), so that the only changes would be in how the votes are handled under the hood. "Fragmenting"? If anything, it seems to me that the existing Digg/reddit algorithms would be more fragmenting, keeping users within their existing communities of friend who vote for each others' stories; a random-selection box would give stories with "crossover appeal" a greater chance of success, bringing them to the attention of users who might otherwise never have seen them. As for "unfair and undemocratic", presumably this is a reaction to the fact that the votes of 100 users decide what everyone else sees. But it's already the case with Digg that the votes of a small number of users decide what content becomes popular. At least with a random sample of users, it would be the case that the vast majority of the time, the voting outcome would be the same as it would have been if the entire site had voted, due to the magic of representative sampling.
So, I'm putting this suggestion out there for the same reason that Jim Messenger bought out Spike The Vote -- because I don't want sites like Digg and reddit to be manipulated by the abusers. In fact, if they used this algorithm, they would become more meritocratic than they are now, because the systems would strictly favor the highest-rated content, instead of content written by people who have informal networks of friends who can all go digg their stories for them. If I were to design the user rating system to make it cheat-proof, these are the exact details of what I would do:
- Wherever they decide to post the "random story sampling" box (on the front page, or on a link off to a separate page, etc.), have it work so that as soon as new stories are submitted, they can be rotated into that box and displayed to a random set of users, until it's reached its total of 100 votes or however many are required to get a random sample.
- You can have "shutout voting" to kill off stories early that are obvious spam or otherwise really useless, without going through the full 100 votes. (For example, if 90% of the first 10 votes are negative, then stop collecting votes.) This decreases the number of users "inconvenienced" by really obvious spam and other garbage.
- For someone to submit content that gets rotated into that voting process, have them submit a Turing test (read numbers off of a graphic and type them in), or something similar. This prevents spammers from submitting spam content over and over just to have it viewed by those initial 10 voters. If they have to type in a number each time, it's not worth it.
- When users give votes to a story, give them the option to say why they voted the way that they did. (This is especially valuable if they're giving negative votes, then the submitter would know what to improve.) Personally I think the comments would be more valuable if each user can't see other users' comments, at the time they submit their own comments; this prevents the "me too" effect where everybody echoes the first two commenters. (When I ask for independent comments from people, and they almost all say the same thing without seeing each other's comments, that's when I know they have a point!)
- To prevent an attacker from having their own username hit the random-voting page over and over in hopes of voting up their own content, make sure that each user account is only allowed to vote on a given piece of content once (even if they found the content through the random-story page).
- Require a Turing test for new user signups. This would prevent an attacker from registering a huge number of accounts just to hit the random voting page with different users over and over, in hopes getting to vote on their own submitted content eventually.
Then after running this system for a while, look through some collected data to determine if the system could be more efficient. For example, do you really need a sample of 100 votes every time? Suppose you determine that in 99% of cases, you get the same result just from tabulating the first 50 votes, as you would have gotten from tabulating all 100 votes. Then you could modify the system to collect only the first 50 votes, and then make a decision.
Suggestions for improvement? Flaws (hopefully not fatal)? Everyone who cares about keeping community sites like Digg free from abuse, and who wants to create a path for the best content to rise to the top, let's put our heads together and see what we can think of. The above is intended merely as a jumping-off point, and although I've worked it over and I can't see any specific points to improve efficiency, that's probably just because I've been looking at it too long. And if you Digg this story for me I'll give you 1,000 times as much cash as I gave my Mom last Mother's Day.
There's a cheaper way (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There's a cheaper way (Score:4, Funny)
Of course more seriously, presumably the firehose voting can be rigged too.
Re:There's a cheaper way (Score:5, Funny)
Firehose leak fixed (Score:2)
In my most recent submission (yesterday on fascism, digg it
--
Vote with your roof: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user s -selling-solar.html [blogspot.com]
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Presumably, the act of submitting an article is a tacit vote for the article. Then again, mental illness seems slightly over represented in the Slashdot community at times...
--JoeBetter still ... (Score:2)
In communist Russia, the stories bury you (Score:2)
But seriously, I prefer not having to digg stories, meta-moderating once a week or two is about as much time as I can spend on this at the moment. So hopefully Slashdot will not go too far down the American Idol route, I just want some Linux news and some bad jokes from the users.
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Digg is already on top of the situation (Score:5, Informative)
The answer is pretty simple. U/S is supposed to give you a lot of bogus links to click in addition to the paid links, just to throw Digg off their trail. But the bogus stories aren't randomly chosen for each person. As I clicked on each story I was told to digg, I would check the other accounts of people who had dugg it. And, sure enough, most everyone else was digging the exact same stories I was. Therefore, it was pretty simple for Digg to sign up with U/S, get the list of stories, search their own database for people who had dugg ALL of those stories, and close them out with absolute certainty.
So, what U/S needs to do is to 1) randomly choose bogus stories for each person and 2) don't give EVERYONE the link to the real story to digg. Digg would still find out which stories hit the front page because of U/S, but it would take Digg days or weeks instead of hours to track down the abusers and shut down the accounts.
Right now, U/S is too much of a hassle because you have to create a new Digg account every few hours.
Digg Down (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Digg Down (Score:5, Funny)
Yes: make sure that it's clear, concise, factually correct and that the masses don't agree with what you've written.
Re:Digg Down (Score:4, Informative)
A good design (Score:3, Insightful)
stand the test of time, and the masses.
Kudos to slashdot.
Re:A good design (Score:5, Interesting)
People can preference it out as it could have the topic
revenue and it neuters the outside manipulators.
-nB
Re:A good design (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A good design (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot's readership tends to mod up posts they agree with and mod down those they don't, regardless of whether the posts actually further the discussion on the topic. Of course the editors can manipulate that to ensure that the site stays on topic and appeals to the target demographic. I am not claiming that this is a bad thing but the system certainly doesn't just run itself, nor does it generate any real discussion of anything.
I am probably less emotionally invested in my online personality that most people but Slashdot has plenty of users who will respond to their own posts complaining about some moderation they have received. I don't see why it matters to anyone. A person could create a new account and quickly build excellent karma by recycling highly rated old comments from previous stories, never even having to think up a post on their own. There are more than enough moderators who just want to see things they agree with rise to the top regardless of whether they are getting their blocks trolled off.
That, lame jokes, and endless learning by metaphor is really what drives the site.
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Well sometimes, especially when there is no real news happening, the discussions on gun control or whatever are often more interesting than TFA.
>Of course the editors can manipulate that to ensure that the site stays on topic
I hope not, that is a very colonial view of what the topic is.
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Any time I start to feel like Slashdot's moderation system is messed up, I either go to metamod (and do what I can to fix it) or to Digg (and then run screaming back to Slashdot).
MOD PARENT DOWN!!! (Score:4, Funny)
I vehemently disagree with your post.
If only I had mod points. . .
Re:A good design (Score:5, Insightful)
I hold (or at least, express on Slashdot) contrarian views on several issues. I try to express them reasonably and politely, and find that I'm often moderated up for those posts, even though most of the other posts express the opposite views. It's as though there's a large but fairly silent majority on those issues, people with enough karma to have mod points.
Yeah, some days I get moderated down well under water before that happens (usually when I'm being too snide or to subtle in my sarcasm), but that's not often, and my karma can take it.
I can't guarantee that any particular posting will survive the whims of the moderators, but it seems to me that a whole view is rarely suppressed: somebody's similar postings will be modded up. (If you're the only one on Slashdot who thinks a particular way, then you're probably wrong about whatever it is. There's always somebody out there who agrees with you unless you're batshit crazy.)
I think that the proof of the pudding is in the eating: I find that although the Slashthink often infuriates me, there are enough insightful comments that it's worth going in to many articles. That's especially true when I feel there's something missing in the story, e.g. some energy breakthrough which I'm certain is overplayed but I don't know why.
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I'm sure I'll get modded down for this.
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Very rarely but it does happen. An example is the article about Blizzard in a legal battle with cheat makers. Even though Blizzard is attacking fair use, many people didn't care simply because they are tired of cheaters.
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Re:A good design (Score:5, Insightful)
There are also a number of other tools that Slashdot offers that can help you while browsing the comments. Don't like reading the Soviet Russia and Futurama reference jokes? Just change your preferences so that comments moderated as funny are weighted less heavily. If you find a user that seems to get moderated insightful for comments that you feel are trolls, add him as a foe and weigh such posts less heavily. The simple fact that there are options like this on Slashdot make it so much better than other sites when it comes to the quality of comments.
The only other than I can do is to encourage you to be a good moderator. Maybe there's something you agree with or find interesting, but it's already been moderated as such so it might be more worthwhile to sink your points somewhere else. The simple fact of the matter is that any system implemented, no matter how good on paper, is still at the mercy of people who don't always tend to act rightly. Slashdot will never be perfect, but I enjoy it for what it is, and that's why I continue to come here.
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Because of the mod categories and metamoderation, Slashdotters mostly express their opinions by modding up rather than down. Often this results in the best posts for each point of view being rated +4 or +5 -- an excellent result that makes it worthwhile to read at +4 and +5 when you don't have much time.
Re:A good design (Score:5, Funny)
What's the problem, I never metaphor I didn't like! (nyuck nyuck.) But seriously, a community site without metaphors is a train wreck waiting to happen.
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MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Funny)
Mod this guy FUNNY (Score:2)
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Re:A good design (Score:5, Funny)
-Rick
Re:A good design (Score:5, Funny)
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stand the test of time, and the masses.
While this maybe true, digg's voting is also very poweful (and I say this as someone who has had a slashdot account for a long time and checks it far more than digg). As mentioned in the editorial, bogus or lame stories get buried pretty quickly. Compare to slashdot's games section where Zonk's "stories," which either don't explain what he's talking about, are obviously slanted
Re:A good design (Score:5, Informative)
Adios karma!
As an ex-Digg user, I noticed a totally different trend. These days the top stories are lame videos or pictures. Digg is no longer about news, it's about what people think are cool videos and pictures. Digg is worthless to find news. Not to mention the comment section, I lose 20 IQ every time I read something there. At least on Slashdot you can find interesting stories and some very insightful commentaries. Digg also has zillions of blog spams, people posting their worthless blog posts where they link another article and whatnot.
Digg has almost no content worth reading.
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To ensure that you can't have other members simply go to the site vote up your work at your request I'll have the site present 20 random images to each member for their 'official' judging input; each image will be judged on a scale
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tl;dr (Score:5, Funny)
Re:tl;dr (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think that would ever work. I mean... maybe, let's say if you somehow marketed it towards obsessive geeks who'd actually waste their time all day writing comments, moderating, and then what? You'd need a way to moderate the community moderation system, like some sort of meta-moderation. Who'd be a big enough loser to spend their time that way?
Not me. I'm not going to waste my time arguing about inconsequential topics on some dumb geeky community website.
Re:tl;dr (Score:5, Interesting)
back OT, Digg's focus is to "Digg" around on the internet and find interesting stuff. Where Slashdot is about Quality, Digg is all about Quantity and cleverness. I find myself on Digg more (to follow the links than to discuss) because Slashdot has slowed down.. every time somebody post Lego robots, or weird news, etc (the "news for nerds" part of the slogan!) it gets flamed as "stupid" or not a "relevant" issue to the Slashdot (stuff that matters) "agenda". I've noticed from Firehose that clever quirky stuff just isn't making front page anymore even if it gets hits.
I'd say each site has it's place. In a lot of ways Digg "gaming" doesn't hurt if it doesn't happen too much as it's usually interesting stuff if somebody wants it there enough to go to all that work. On the other hand, Slashdot has better discussion. Slashdot has that cool factor of actual industry insiders that will show up and post... that's way cool and they only do it because Slashdot has that history. If Slashdot wants to remain "relevant" there's the ticket... get more actual people from the industry to post, answer questions, etc... that's where the NEWS really is.
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Half-Empty was doing "everybody votes" years before Digg was even thought of (even doing it AJAX-style before the buzzword was coined -- I remember being impressed by that). And I'm sure
I'd like to see a snippets site using reddit-style voting and an advogato-style trust metric. I'd build it myself but for two reasons:
1) It'd be unaffordable to host u
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Sure - there might be some underlying emotional / personal investment involved in this particular case. However... it does also touch on a grander
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How to Destroy the Competition, Slashdot Style (Score:5, Funny)
(2) As a "courtesy" to the community, post an article on Slashdot announcing this fact, describing the technique in detail, and offering a solution that will almost certainly be ignored by your competitor.
(3) Rub your hands in satisfaction as thousands more spammers are now made aware how easy it is to manipulate the competition.
(4) Watch the competition crash and burn as its signal to noise ratio plummets to zero.
(5) Profit!
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Digg Sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
The concept of digg is good in theory, but once you let the inmates run the asylum, the game is over.
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Can't we get one story done without drifting towards discussing politics?
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The question is then do the readers of digg care if content is paid or not? It re
Ballot box stuffing is easy on /. too (Score:3, Funny)
Meh, You call yourself a Chicagoian? (Score:3, Informative)
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Eat at fishey Joes
Ride the Walrus!
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About 10 years ago, I bought my mother a t-shirt to wear when voting. It said, "I'm from Chicago... TWO BALLOTS PLEASE".
She thought it was hysterical.
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That's how it's done over by 'dare.
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(it's a joke son, laugh)
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(Most non-Chicagoans laugh here, but that's not the joke.)
They come to one tombstone that's weathered and worn, so one of them stoops to rub it off.
"Come on", the other one says, "there's plenty more here".
"No", the first one says, "This guys got just as much a right to vote as everyone else".
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terrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the submitter is trying to translate a method that "diggs" a photo into a method that diggs a story. Story take much more time to read than photos. It simply doesn't work the same.
Re:terrible idea (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
One of the things I like about digg over slashdot is that I quickly run out of stuff to read on slashdot. If I had less free time while at the computer, it wouldn't be an issue.
Used to be high on digg (Score:5, Interesting)
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Quick way to do it (Score:2, Insightful)
That way its simply a case of attrition to see if people can scroll far enough to "digg it".
chances are they will lose interest when something shiney in the sidebar [AMAZING!!!!! PICTURES!!!!!] catches their eye.
Digg is lame anyway. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Democracy gone crazy? Democracy is crazy. The tyranny of the majority, etc., coupled with systemic misinformation?
There's a reason that democracy in its pure form doesn't exist anywhere in the political world -- it's a flawed system. If the goal is good discourse, then any site should realize this and not allow a purely democratic system.
However, my guess is that the owners of Digg are
Re:Digg is lame anyway. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now when ever I check Digg. I normally get the following topic.
Look at the Cool Picture [cool, beautiful...]
The Bush Administration is Evil because...
Atheist are more moral people then anyone else.
Religious people suck because...
The Digg Systems of Moderation of comments is far worse then slashdots. At least in Slashdot most opposing viewpoints and not normally moderated down to base levels and usually spur debate. Digg if you defend Religion, the Bush Administration... You are quite quickly buried, and with little debate on the topic.
Before it was so popular Digg actually had some good and more intelligent stuff but not because it go so popular it is more average joe interest story.
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For awhile it was chaos, than the spammers showed up, than the guys advertising their blogs than the Ubuntu zealots showed up; it got bad when the page was almost filled with Ubuntu articles they knew they had to do something which is why we don't get spammed by every new taste of Linux also. There was a time when it was first released we would get great articles from places like hackaday.com and other cool DIY stuff.
I still enjoy the site because I can quickly glimpse over a retar
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I try to ignore Digg, and I try to avoid sites that opt into the Digg circlejerk - I have yet to find that little "digg it!" icon attached to anything of merit.
Of course, I'm not an eighteen year old hipster doofus trying to get laid through teh intarwebz. Which puts me way, way
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Not quite (Score:5, Insightful)
Both RNC and DNC have expressed interest (Score:2)
Sure, why not expand the game area? (Score:2)
The problem is the users not the submitters (Score:2)
Now I hate the people that only submit their own crappy websites, but the fact is that if people take a second to look and realize th
Unintended Consequences: Rebiased voting (Score:2)
Fundamentally, 'bots must be fought by tasks they cannot accomplish, like confused OCR or fuzzy logic.
Absolute user ratings are broken by design (Score:2)
Some people will always try to abuse a system.
There is only one solution for this and that's using a web of trust with weighted ratig. People you trust have a higher rating and the people that the people you trust trust (friend of friends), etc.
The result ofcourse would be a different rating for articles for every user.
Yes, it is like the friend/foe system for comments on
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The best case scenario is what you describe: People get trusted by their peers, their votes are considered more valuable, they in turn tag others as friends, hopefully based on them being sane people.
The worst case would be that some loonies end up on that 'trusted' list. Maybe deliberately so. That "game" has been played other places before that implement a 'friend/foe' system: Be sane, considerate, give helpful or insightful comments, get on the good side of people, ge
Ding? (Score:2)
Unfair comparisons (Score:5, Informative)
I go to Digg when I want OMG!!!! L33T Fanboi yatayata...
Digg is, in short, a wasteland. The submissions are great but if one wrote the book on it, "Pooh foraging for honey" would read like Tolstoy.
DIGG - dead to me (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? Nowhere in the HotOrNot FAQ ( http://www.hotornot.com/pages/faq.html [hotornot.com] ) does it mention that only certain votes are counted. In fact, the FAQ addresses a question about friends clicking on your photo:
Randomization wouldn't work on digg, because I'd say about 90% of the submissions are spam/junk or repeats. If you make me wade through that 90% randomly in order for me to vote on something I think is interesting, I'm going to stop voting altogether. Me and hundreds of thousands of others, I suspect.
Popularity != Good (Score:4, Insightful)
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If a Presidential Candidate can use their resources to increase their vote count, isn't that just proving their popularity?
Sure, within reason.
Vote buying (which is Digg's problem) OTOH...
All it proves is that you induced people to vote.
It does not prove that they liked your submission or that it is popular.
Influencing people = good
Buying votes = bad
You see the difference?
Too big of a change (Score:2)
This probably wouldn't work as a change to Digg or reddit because it changes the whole idea. Currently, I rank on digg after I've seen a story from selected category and/or popularity, selected by headline. So I rate after I've (partially) used the ratings of the other users, whereas with the presented idea, either I rate random stories or I see (but cannot rate) highly-ranking stories. Different principle, really.
StumbleUpon beat you to it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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If it is possible to join without them downloading some random, undescribed, undocumented software, I'd be interested. But I have zero interest in a site that simply wants me to trust them that whatever they are downloading is no big deal (probably a toolbar, which is mostly harmless but which I certainly don't want).
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If you're still paranoid, just Google around... it has quite a community and I can say with fair certainty you won't
Summary (Score:2)
"I have devised a marvellous way to stop Digg-cheating, which this article summary is too short to contain."
(aka: if it's so simple, why does it take 19361 more bytes to explain it?)
Heck, I noticed this over a year ago (Score:2)
Still broken: greasemonkey (Score:2)
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Leaving aside for the moment that it probably wasn't all that expensive... there are financial incentives for getting eyeballs on content. It can, through various mechanisms, increase the apparent credibility of a site, and thus eventually your Google rankings... it can rather immediately produce a shot of impression stats and AdSense revenue, and so on. It can also make the "author"
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Of course I also read Fark, Slashdot, and CNN.com everyday too, so what do I know.
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Modern monarchs aren't generally thugs, but only because they have no power anymore.
Actually it's likely more what they do on the net. (Score:2)
I've found myself hating "nonpa
Re:Actually it's likely more what they do on the n (Score:2)
There's no contradiction here. Look at their about page: