If Everyone Shares Our Digg Practices, will Kevin Rose Admit Digg Is Still Gamed?

It was a peculiar day for Digg yesterday, I think. Yes, we all know that it is getting harder and harder to get to the front page of Digg due to Kevin and the team changing the algorithm so that votes from submitter's friends counted less than non-friends votes. And yes, we all know that you can't get on Digg front page just by writing a great (newsworthy, breaking actually, stylish - whatever) piece of content that someone will choose to submit to Digg.

I remember in the early days of Profy I actually thought Digg was really people-powered and natural - how naïve to actually believe this! Later on I realized that to get to the Digg homepage the easiest way is to have some great news story submitted by a top digger. So I approached some of the top diggers and now I have quite a few of them on my IM contact lists. Did it help? Definitely - they promoted a few stories to the Digg homepage for us, they enjoyed the success, we enjoyed the traffic. And then everything was over in a matter of days. I am not going to discuss the famous Digg bury brigade again but for some reason Profy got on the list - and we have not had any single story on the Digg front page for more than half a year now, no matter how many top diggers helped me with the story and used their friends to promote it.

But that's not the point for this post. It looks like yesterday was the day for some major blogs to expose the Digg practices (involuntary, in both cases their former bloggers chose to make this public) - and this was how we got to know that both Techcrunch and Gawker Media have their special Digg armies (mailing lists) intended to promote their content to Digg's front page.

First Duncan Riley made public a screenshot of his inbox with tons of requests for votes which was published on Gawker's Valleywag. Then Jordan Golson, former Gawker blogger currently writing for The Industry Standard, decided that it would only be fair to expose the same mailing list existing in the Gawker Media itself. And the conclusion? Yes, it is against Digg ToS but it is still a commonplace and your site is just lazy not to have the same process arranged. And I know at least one major technology blog doing absolutely the same but I won't name it since I'm not sure they want it exposed and I have no grudges against them. (Oh and I admit, we are lazy at Profy but not intentionally - I just know that we will not get above "Hot in all topics" and will be buried by a script doing this to our blog and, supposedly, to a number of other blogs as well.)

And now that everyone decided to share some of unspoken Digg-related practices, let me add my 2 cents to the chorus.

Sure, we remember that such practices are against Digg ToS. But that will never change my mind - I will still help the top diggers and my fellow bloggers with votes on their content, even if I receive tons of such requests daily. And when I see all the stories that I know of preliminary promotion activities actually make it to the front page, I can't help but believe that absolutely no stories actually make it there naturally.

Moreover, we all know that it is strictly forbidden to use any scripts for submissions and votes on Digg. I have not seen anyone publicly admitting to doing this - yet. But does that mean no one does this? I don't think so, I myself know one person actively engaged in automated content promotion to the front page. And you know what? I see new posts by this person make it to the front page pretty often. Is he the only one doing this? I highly doubt it and I'm sure that some of my readers know people engaged in similar activities as well. Do major blogs and blog networks use this? I have no idea here but I would not say it is improbable.

So basically the entire blogosphere is heavily engaged in gaming Digg. After all, Digg front page means traffic, traffic means money and why not game the system to get the money if it is actually the only way to get where you want? And I am not trying to criticize anyone here: as a blogger I know what efforts it takes to gain visibility for content and if you want to stay obscure, go ahead and focus on writing high-quality content hoping that someone will notice you and tell the world you exist. Everyone else is heavily engaged in promoting their content everywhere, including Digg. My only question is: will Kevin Rose ever admit Digg is still gamed and will always be gamed? At least stop making naive people believe it is all natural, will you?