Subvert and Profit

You may have noticed that we have been keeping relatively quiet recently. We have been scheming behind our closed doors, patiently awaiting the right time for our next big move. Our service has grown faster than we expected, so we have also been dealing with some scaling issues. We are taking a careful, measured approach to our expansion going forward. There are many exciting new things in the works. As we close out our fourth month of running advertisements, we are taking time to reflect on everything we have learned gaming Digg and StumbleUpon.

Digg - quality over quantity

We have always known that “spammy” advertisements are going to get buried by the Digg community, and we continue to reject them. Our service has proven most useful for stories with merit that need the critical first bump to get exposure. Similarly, our service has been successfully used to propel stories already on the front page into the day’s top 10 list. Since this is the case, we have been seeking out advertisers most suited to Digg, and we have had great success doing so. While some argue that these advertisers don’t need our service anyway, our experience has proven this overwhelmingly false. As much as some like to fantasize about Digg as a democratic meritocracy, if you have nothing going for you besides good content, you will not make it onto the front page. Good content is only half the battle, and Subvert and Profit has become a convenient, one-stop-shop for “the other half.” The front page of Digg remains dominated by the various cabals of top users, and Subvert and Profit provides the means to bypass their ring of control.

StumbleUpon - tricky tricky

In the past month we have become much more familiar with the complexity of the StumbleUpon algorithm. Advertiser’s reports of traffic have varied greatly since the beginning, though on average, they have been close to what we predicted. Patterns were initially difficult to single out. After much contemplation of our early results, though, we have gained key insights into the algorithm, and have started applying them. Votes on StumbleUpon are weighted significantly by a list of conditions. For example, a vote is weighted more heavily if the user adds tags or writes a review. The next iterations of our service are going to include drastic improvements that will optimally manipulate these conditions.

That’s all for now. You can expect some upgrades to the functionality and interface of Subvert and Profit over the next few weeks, and some key announcements in September.

Update: we reconfigured how we talk to the mail server and it works now.  This new method should also be better going forward.

Most excellent users,

It has come to our attention that both the signup function and contact form are down. This suggests that the connectivity between our Ruby on Rails server and our mail server is down. We are working hard to fix this. In the meantime, please direct any inquiries through the comment form on this blog. All comments go through moderation, so private inquiries will not be posted publicly.

We apologize for the inconvenience! No really - we realize how stupid this is, and we’re working as fast as possible.

- the S&P team

That’s right, our second ship is now in full service of the fleet. Go add funds and buy some votes on StumbleUpon! They’re only $1 a piece, and unlike our Digg service, you can test our StumbleUpon service out one vote at a time if you’d like.

But before you do, let’s talk about how it’s gonna go down. Since StumbleUpon is not time-sensitive like Digg, we can stretch out our gaming activity over the course of a few days to avoid detection, and this is what we are going to do. So, don’t be alarmed if you don’t get all your votes in a short period of time. Also, at this early stage in our operation, where we’re still just testing the waters, we’d like you to limit the number of votes you buy for a particular URL to 30 per week. We may increase this number as we grow in experience with gaming StumbleUpon. Check out the new guidelines for further information.

Let’s do this thing!

After registering over 400 StumbleUpon users, we are ready to start running advertisements.  Advertisers wishing to purchase votes on StumbleUpon can do so starting this Monday.

StumbleUpon is a completely different medium from Digg, and so our methods of promotion must also be very different.  The key difference is that with StumbleUpon, time is not an issue.  Because of this, we are choosing to spread out our votes over a long period of time, as opposed to 24 hours on Digg, to avoid detection by StumbleUpon.

The advertiser referral program, where we pay you a 10% commission on every referred advertiser’s purchases, will also apply to StumbleUpon.

Those of you waiting to get your StumbleUpon accounts verified, I assure you that you will be verified before Monday, assuming you have voted for your verification story, and your StumbleUpon profile’s content filter is set to the lowest rating.

We shall subvert StumbleUpon as we have subverted Digg, and the profits shall be abundant!  Go forth, users!  Subvert and Profit!

We have said since the beginning that Digg was only our first target. As we have grown, we have learned so much about how to game social media sites. We even survived a direct assualt by Digg one month ago, which forced us to make our system more complex. The new system has been refined many times over, and we can now call ourselves “experts” at this stuff.

Thus, the incubation stage is over, and we are going to spread, spread, spread! We will expand to sites in the order in which they have the most users and are easiest to game. After considering a few possible targets, StumbleUpon emerged as the clear winner. Here’s why:

• StumbleUpon has over 2.6 million users as of today and is the fastest growing social bookmarking service.
• Gaming activity is far less suspicious because there is no single public view of activity, unlike Digg. When a person sees a story on the front page of Digg with 80 votes, they can ask “why did 80 people vote for this?” In the case of StumbleUpon, users click the “Stumble!” button and are taken to a random page, which could have been voted for by 1 or 10,000 people, and the numbers are not apparent without further research.
• StumbleUpon also promotes its own advertisements, so there may be less outcry.
• StumbleUpon offers a linear traffic model. Digg is an all or nothing proposition, and many advertisers are afraid of wasting money if their story gets buried. Our StumbleUpon service will also allow advertisers with smaller budgets to use S&P.
• StumbleUpon users are far more diverse in their interests than the Digg crowd, and this allows more advertisers to use our service.

Why not Reddit?

Many people assumed that Reddit was going to be our next target, and even asked us if we would please expand to Reddit. However, Reddit is smaller than StumbleUpon, offers a traffic model that is more similar to Digg, and users’ votes are not set to be publicly shown by default.

Reddit is not for us.

The next few weeks

We are now accepting StumbleUpon users, though new Digg users are always welcome as well. Once we have a critical mass of StumbleUpon users, we will open up to advertisements, so stay tuned. Digg advertising will continue as normal.

Subvert and Profit is pleased to announce the advertiser referral program: starting right now, you will earn a 10% commission on every advertisement from every advertiser you refer to us!

This means that if you refer even one advertiser to us, and that advertiser buys 100 Diggs every week, you make $10 per week!  Or if you’re an advertiser, all you have to do is refer a few of your friends and you get free advertisements with us!

This program comes in addition to our very successful Digg user referral program.  With the two programs combined, you can start to make some serious cash.

So go forth and refer!  All you need is the same link you use to refer new Digg users, which can be found on your Digg user page.

Earlier in the week our host decided to upgrade to the newest version of Ruby on Rails without warning.  This caused our login engine to stop working and crashed the site,  so we had to put a new one in.  The new engine includes better referral links, as the old ones didn’t work half of the time.  Check ‘em out on your Digg user page.

We have also added an “I’m done” button for you to click when you have finished Digging a list of stories.  This helps us pay you faster, and ensures that we don’t accidentally miss anyone.

We’re still alive and strong!

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!