[…] Come On Digg… We Need a REAL Response: An Overview of Community Reactions Posted by Derick on March 2nd, 2007 It seems like every week is someone's week to get kicked around.  Last week it was MyBlogLog.  This week it appears to be Digg.  For days stories have been circulating about "bury brigades".  And now Wired is running a story (which I covered yesterday) about the ease of buying your way onto the Digg front page.   Reaction to both discussions has been mixed.  Blog posts and news articles popped up all over the Internet in response to the bury brigade claims.  So many, in fact, that Digg founder Kevin Rose posted a public response on the Digg Blog.  While it's mostly just empty rhetoric, the response at least shows that Digg is listening.  Not responding.  But listening.   This morning, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land also weighed in on the claims.  And as he pointed out, Digg isn't going to be able to continue ignoring the burying situation much longer without having to deal with some backlash from publishers:  After a week of questions about Digg's "Bury Brigade," Digg founder Kevin Rose has come in with some public comments about the system and the "alleged" brigade. Unfortunately, they're just comments — not solutions to protect Digg from the actual brigade I myself can see.  […]  Let me as a content provider understand if someone's targeting me. If not, at least I know I should yank down all those Digg buttons sending you my traffic and point them to sites that show more respect for content owners. (Source: Search Engine Land) Interestingly, the article referenced above was submitted to Digg.  And promptly buried.  In the comments, one of the users who buried the story left a comment that actually supports the idea of bury brigade.  Luckily some other diggers called this user out:  Great canewediggit. Bury a legit story as spam about burying abuse when you know it isn't spam, because the author didn't submit the story. I think you are just contributing to the problem here. YOU just illustrated the story for all of us.  Stop burying based on opinions. Nobody cares what you think. The bury button is there get rid of malicious, inaccurate, spam story's. You don't need to bury it just because you don't like it. If nobody likes it, then it won't get diggs. ———- Oh the irony. Digg user says there is no bury brigade and promptly buries the story. ——— Well, you prove entirely the point of the article you probably failed to read. The article I wrote demonstrates there is a brigade of some type burying every single article we've had submitted over the past two days. This one was buried less than 15 minutes after it went it. And if you've been burying every article about a bury brigade problem — hey — you yourself prove that one exists. It's quite comical.  But it's also very sad.  I've never (ever) seen a company ignore this much rampant abuse of their product.  Come on Digg… where's the response?   Now the Wired article is a different story.  Some, like myself, focused on the message behind the Wired story.  Others seem to be focused on the apparent conflict of interest associated with the story.  TechCrunch's Michael Arrington thinks Digg should sue Wired over the article.  Why?  Because Wired's parent company is also the owner of Reddit - a Digg competitor.  Arrington's, and others, take is that Wired is running the article to slam Digg in hopes of tarnishing the service's reputation.   Maybe so.  But you know what?  Who cares?  Digg's reputation is already tarnished.  The people who actually know something about the service know how bad the corruption is.  The Wired article exposes a huge problem with the service that needs to be exposed.  The management at Digg is never going to do anything about the problems with their service until there's enough backlash over them.   Annalee Newitz, the author of the Wired article, has responded to the criticisms.  And as she points out, her original article did contain similar reports of abuse on Reddit.  But Reddit's audience is minuscule next to Digg's.  And so the Reddit bits were pulled because there's no real room for comparison:  So why did we target Digg and not Reddit in the Wired News piece? Again, the answer is simple. Digg is so big that an entire industry has sprung up around gaming it, and therefore I could hire a company that would pay people to digg my story. There is no such comparable industry or company that will game Reddit. Again, I love Reddit and I think it’s very cool — but writing about it in this context would have been like comparing apples and oranges. (Source:  Techsploitation) Valleywag also responded directly to Arrington with a piece by piece dissection of his arguments:  Arrington himself calls the article "a piece of investigative journalism," then turns round and roasts it for being investigative. That is, gaming Digg for an article about gaming Digg is "making the news," rather than reporting it. No, it's investigating the news, and testing and verifying the news you're reporting. […]  It's never fun being the target of an investigative piece, but getting all hot and bothered over the investigation is a historically standard reaction from parties who strike at the methods because they don't like the results.  (Source:  Valleyway) So now, as usual, the ball rests squarely in the hands of the Digg management.  Still.  Will we ever see a real response?  I think the folks behind the curtains at Digg are afraid of angering their long-time users by making drastic changes.  I think that's the best thing that could happen.  Shake things up.  Make the people abusing the system mad.  Hopefully they'll jump ship.   And in their absence, a new breed of responsible, mature users will take their place.  […]