Subvert and Profit

The recent Digg honey pot attack, while it was a hassle and did some damage, has left Subvert and Profit essentially intact.  We lost a chunk of users, either to banning or to our new policy of only allowing trusted users to vote, but many of them have switched in a new Digg account.  We are still running advertisements at the same rate… in fact, our trusted users are now happier because they have more things to Digg.

By falling back onto our trusted users, we ensure that our operation will continue without honey pot attacks in the future.  This may slow our growth until we expand to our next site, but it is definitely worth it.

If you have been banned and have not yet entered your new account on your Digg user page, here are the very simple steps:

• Delete your browser cookies.  On Firefox this is Tools >> Clear Private Data, and on Internet Explorer this is Tools >> Delete browsing history >> Delete cookies
• Download Tor if you don’t already have it.  Tor anonymizes your IP address, so Digg cannot associate you with your old account.  Then download the Torbutton extension for Firefox.  You should really just use Firefox for Subvert and Profit work.
• Create a new account on Digg.  You know the deal here.
• Enter it into your Subvert and Profit user page, and you’re set!

The attack has been good for us, since we were forced to think deeper about strategy, both for the present and going forward.  Stick around with us: we’ll be sticking around for a while.

Most-excellent S&P users,

After analyzing which users have been banned, we have concluded that Digg set up a “honey pot” of multiple fake users to see which stories were being paid for. They were thus able to determine a few stories that were being promoted and banned the users who Dugg them.

In response to this, we are going to fall back onto our trusted users. Since we have been in successful operation for a while now, we have a large base of users who have been with us prior to the creation of the honey pot. We know the exact time of this based on the stories users were getting banned for Digging. As long as we only allow trusted users to Digg for us, we should be virtually impenetrable moving forward.

We have added functionality to change your Digg username; this can be found on your Digg user page. We have quarantined all users who were Digging the same stories as the banned users, and will un-quarantine them after they change their Digg account with us.

How to Change Your Digg Account:

Digg can track you not just by your username, but through cookies and by your IP address as well. In order to change your Digg username and avoid getting banned in the future, you must first delete the cookies from your browser and then sign up for a new Digg account using the IP anonymizing service known as Tor. Tor is very easy to use, and there is a handy Firefox add-on for it here.  Once you have done this, enter your new account on your Digg user page.

How S&P Will Grow Going Forward:

S&P will no longer be accepting new users who were not referred by one of our trusted users, at least for a while. If you have been Digging for us for a long time, please refer some of your friends right now through email.

And of course, we are planning to expand to our next site in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

Other Actions We Have Taken:

In the event that our honey pot conclusion was wrong, we have also changed our algorithms significantly, and have changed our de-referrer service, just in case Digg bought them out.

Subvert and Profit will never die!

It appears that Digg finally found a small segment of our userbase and has banned them. In the last 24 hours, we’ve heard from 8 out of our 1000+ users. This low number is encouraging, since it means that this was just a small slip on our part.

We’re going to lay low for a couple days, gather information from the banned users, and figure out how to prevent this in the future. We will never stop improving our algorithms and techniques. If you have been banned, please contact us so we can ask you some questions about your usage of our service.

We are also going to lower the minimum withdrawal amount to $5 over the next few days.

A few of you have asked if we can change the Digg account connected to your S&P account. We are going to make a function to do this, but there is the issue of IP addresses and cookies. Digg can track you by either of those methods, so before we change your Digg account we’re going to have to verify that you have deleted your cookies and are using Tor. This is very easy to do… more on this soon.

Remember, contact us if you have been banned!

We made it!  We’ve now been around long enough for our users to reap the benefits of our system.  A significant portion of our userbase has just received their first $10 payout, a few of whom made more than half of this in referral income.

Initially, we overlooked the fact that users would sign up with an email address besides the one linked to their PayPal account.  We corrected this quickly by allowing users to enter their PayPal email address on the finance page, but this caused the finance page to crash for users viewing it for the first time.  This is a cookies issue, and if you are still having trouble accessing the finance page, just delete the cookies from your browser and the problem will vanish.

Stay tuned for an entry about the future directions of this site…

We are pleased to introduce referral links. You now have the option to either send an email to your friends through our site, which will include your link, or post the link yourself into an email or on your blog. Bloggers, we’re looking at you.

Remember, we pay you 20% of your friends’ earnings forever! This does not affect your friends’ earnings. Our users earn anywhere from $3 to $10 per week… do the math yourself, and you will see that this could be one of the most lucrative affiliate programs on the Internet.

To see your link, log in and visit the Digg user page. The link is simply http://subvertandprofit.com/social/ + your Subvert and Profit username.

Thanks for Subverting - it’s time to Profit!

We’ve been promoting stories onto the front page of Digg for almost two weeks now, and we have surprised even ourselves at our effectiveness.  To protect our users, we can’t release too many details, but here are the most important tidbits:

• Not a single user has reported being banned from Digg
• The average user makes $3.50 per week, while top users make about double this.  This should increase as we get more advertisers.
• Not a single advertiser has been dissatisfied with our service.
• Our quality control on advertisements has worked amazingly.  Only on one story was there a single comment that suspected Digg-gaming due to the content of the story.  We quarantined the users on that story for two days, and nothing ever came of it.

So, what’s next?  We’re going to pick up the volume slightly on Digg, and then look beyond.  We don’t want to hurt Digg by promoting too many stories to the front page in a day.  So where are we looking?  Stay tuned…

If you are an advertiser or a user, feel free to post your experiences with our site, e.g. how much you’ve made, how many visitors you got to your site, etc.

Subvert and Profit!

Update: Digg has calmed down, so we’ll start back up immediately. 

And we thought we were creating a stir on Digg by selling votes. Promotion of advertisements will cease for the night, or at least until the very intense rukus about the leaked HD-DVD hex code dies down.

Check out Digg right now to witness a real example of Internet anarchy!

For a while Digg was censoring its users and banning their accounts and IP addresses, but this appears to have stopped, as the front page has been completely dominated by stories about the code for hours now.

Advertisers: we’ll be ready to get you on the front page of Digg as soon as this dies down. Things have been going very well.