Subvert and Profit gets busted
This is exactly why you should think twice before using services that try to
spam Digg. You are placing your trust in a bunch of people who earn
money by Digging a story for 50 cents.
Basically what happened is that Tamar Weinberg, a well known Digg
user, investigated some strange digging activity on a story and then
exposed it. The story was buried and then continued attracting lots of
Diggs when normally the bury would put an end to any natural digging.
Tamar emailed Digg and they said the story was buried by lots of Digg
users.
The blog post reveals that the Digg activity was coming from Subvert
and Profit so all the Digg spam busting team needs to do is look at the email from Tamar, find the story, see which users dugg the story and check their previous digging history
to blow the whole network wide open.
Expect all the sites that have used Subvert and Profit to be added to
the auto bury list this week. Also expect Digg to allow the users to
keep digging stories but to have all their diggs scrutinised and any
suspicious sites they digg added to the auto bury list.
Post category: Social Media Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 8 comments below, or add your own!
It’s good to see they’re taking care of it. I was wondering what was going to happen when that site came out.
Sucks to be those guys right about now. Didn’t seem like a good idea to have such an open community that breaks their policies. Interesting to see what becomes of it.
Hahaha that is a great way to keep the subverters at bay!
I owe you a comment
I truthfully hope that they are really “busted.” It does seem plausible, and I hope it’s actually a reality.
In a way, if Digg actually employs individuals to “game” the system using Subvert and Profit (that is, with their knowledge and approval), they’re keeping Digg purely democratic as long as stories submitted to Subvert & Profit actually never get promoted. I’d hope that Digg and StumbleUpon sees this as an opportunity and not as a threat.
There are a lot of interesting possibilities with this one.
Rubbish. They can’t know which sites are from subvert and which aren’t. All they’d be doing is looking at sites dugg and quess whether or not it came from subvert. That would be descrimination. Best that can be done is to ban users with overtly suspicious diggs. Even then it wouldn’t be right. A buried story is still accessible.. so why not remove it.
Yeah! subvert the shat out of that profit! its just an eddy in the turbulence of capitalism approaching its most stable state of evolutionary equilibrium.
It's actually pretty easy to catch them, so I don't reckon it's such a big deal anymore. Funny how they kept digging even after getting buried!
Yea no kidding..subvert is on the way out now