Why Our Users Won’t Get Banned from Digg
Some of you are hesitant to participate in our program for fear of being banned from Digg. While this is a valid fear, especially since our competitors have failed to protect their users’ privacy, we’d like to tell you how we’ve minimized the risk.
Knowledge is power, and particularly, Digg’s knowledge of suspicious activity is banning power. Digg will have no such knowledge, as we’ve engineered a few tricks to ensure that our users’ activity (and access to their user page) appears normal. Let me give you some details:
- Our algorithm selects users to Digg a story based on how unrelated they are in terms of their Digging history. This is key, because one of the primary methods of detecting “gaming behavior” is seeing if the same group of users Diggs the same stories repeatedly.
- We hide the story you are paid to Digg in a short list of randomly selected stories that you will Digg as well. These stories also show up with the same relative frequency as the paid stories. This prevents Digg from making accounts on our site to see which stories are paid for, and then banning the users who vote for them.
- We never link directly to Digg.
- We verify our users’ Digg activity through a complex string of proxies.
The degree to which our algorithm works is based on the number of users we have. This is precisely why we are registering Digg users for a while before we accept advertisers… and from the rate at which people have been signing up, it looks like we’ll be ready to start soon.
April 3rd, 2007 at 9:33 am
Good ideas - hope it works out well and you don’t sell your ass out for a few dollars like the lamers from spikethevote.
April 3rd, 2007 at 11:44 am
Sounds like you have all bases covered. It will be very interesting to see if this project turns out as a success or just another attempt. Good luck!
April 3rd, 2007 at 6:54 pm
So, what would prevent Digg from setting up a honey pot: signing up for your service, and using the referrals you provide to determine the accounts that are spiking the vote?
April 4th, 2007 at 9:08 am
When a user is assigned to Digg stories, paid stories are hidden in a list of extra, random stories that the user is assigned to Digg. We ensure some of these show up as frequently as the paid stories. Thus, Digg could set up as many accounts on our site as they want, and they still wouldn’t be able to fish out the paid stories… and thus the users Digging them.
Either way, since we don’t plan for our impact to be noticeable, we don’t think Digg will take action to block us.
April 5th, 2007 at 12:33 am
The idea of digg setting up a honey pot, lol, what is this miami vice
April 5th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
How do your users know whether they were part of the first 500 that get the $0.75 per digg?
April 5th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
We’ll make an announcement when we have 500 verified Digg users. We’re in the 400s right now after a lot of media attention, so it should be within the next two days.
April 8th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Great Job Guys!!!
April 9th, 2007 at 10:48 am
For this system to work, there also must be some kind of quality threshold on the stories that S&P accepts into the system. I can see the people behind digg, submitting a shitty story to S&P that they know the regular digg crowd won’t digg and fishing out your users through this type of method.
April 9th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Davis,
You’re absolutely right. We do have a quality control system in place. We won’t jeopardize our users by putting obvious spam on the front page of Digg. This also ensures that we don’t lower the quality of Digg. Everyone wins!
April 17th, 2007 at 7:56 am
If Digg acts as a user, they will not be able to find you. But, I feel that if they act as an advertiser, they should be able to find you quite fast.
May 21st, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Too late for that. I got busted. I recommend that you set up a secondary Digg account with a second email so that if your secondary one gets banned, you can still continue Digging with your normal Account.
August 29th, 2007 at 6:22 am
What would stop Digg faking an account, watching who accesses it, grabbing the IP address and finding who elses account that IP looks at?
Sure you use a proxy chain so they don’t know who you are…
But if you look at them, they then know you, then anyone else you look at? It wouldn’t be so hard…
January 10th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
You guys rule! I’m referring everyone I can get hold of. I’m also Digging and Stumbling on my own so they won’t be able to say I only Digg or Stumble for Subvert and Profit. Keep up the good work.
January 14th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
its great! lo9ve that idea