By Alexey Gavrilov on January 28, 2007

Social media websites are vulnerable to manipulations, which will may eventually lead to their complete extinction.

Digg is big nowadays. Getting the story on the frontpage gives you a very good exposure and it worth a lot of money. For stories inside sections the ratio of link visits to diggs is approximately six (I don’t have extensive stats but that should be about right and well along Occam’s razor rule). The story, which makes it to the frontpage gets much more. Let’s try to evaluate how much exactly does it worth to stick in digg’s frontpage for one day.

Considering that digg.com traffic is estimated as 9M unique visitors monthly (and that for US only!), the cover story keeping on the top for one day will be visible to some 1M visitors at least and will probably get around 3000 clicks. Equivalent AdWords campaign would cost you $2-3k. Or you can check Digg’s rate card here.

Now let’s see how complex it is to make it. It’s surprisingly easy. At the moment of writing the minimal diggs for the cover story was 50 (Newly Popular) and 634 for “Top 10 in All Topics”. Top 10 was led by story with 3600 diggs.

You only need 50 diggs to hit the frontpage! If you have enough friends you can do it. If you neither have friends nor morale you can do it even simpler. All you need is few thousands digg accounts under control. There is a captcha there of course but since you don’t need millions of accounts but thousands only, you can register them manually. 30 seconds per account = 1500 minutes = 25 hours for 3000 accounts, outsource it to India and it will cost you ~$200. Now you can go and digg whatever you like right to the frontpage and enjoy marketing effect worth $3000, 15x more than you spent, right from the first time you do this.

This simple plan is not perfect but you can improve it great deal if you need. For example you can go Elance (the very same place, where original Digg was arranged to be produced for its famous $200) and post “digg marketing tool” project there. Here are requirements for you to copy and paste:

“I need a simple script to automate stories posting to digg. The following functions are required:

- Create accounts in “burst-mode” by populating fields from dictionary and emails from our database.
- There must be special online user interface for human operator to enter “captcha” combinations as requested during account registration
- Manage massive number of accounts, digg or bury requested stories
- There must be provision to allow our accounts digg other users stories randomly, imitating human actions, to keep accounts stealth while not engaged in the campaign
- We need the ability to pick a certain accounts group to perform in particular campaign
- Diggs within campaign should be submitted according to predefined configurable schedule (ie not all at once)
- The software must support operation through proxies to make different accounts appear having different IP addresses, we will provide proxies list
- AJAX GUI would nice but not required

Please note that my budget is limited and I expect that qualified person can do it in one week. Serious bidders only.”

That’s it. If you think that you won’t find people to implement it then you don’t know people. The very same Elance is responsible for thousands of spyware, spam robots and things like that.

If you are not a techie you can go another way -– just hire 3000 people, who will digg stories for you. You won’t believe it but in the world there are millions, who live for less than $100 a month but still have Internet access at work. Pay them 5 cents/digg and they will digg, reddit etc for you anything you like as often as you need. It’s said that some people do it already albeit in smaller scale.

What can digg suggest against this strategy? Practically nothing. Will normal people (known as the community) bury artificially injected and promoted stories? I don’t think so. Most of users don’t read stories but only headlines until some captures their attention. Then they would either digg it to read later or go reading to (maybe) digg or comment on it after. Most people will just ignore bad / irrelevant stories and few will bother to bury it. Next did I tell you that the “marketed” stories will necessary be lame? People, who are serious about the business (and it’s nothing else but the business) can pay for a good story too. There is unlimited number of good stories on digg, which hasn’t been promoted not because they were not good but just because the person who submitted wasn’t social enough to have friends to power initial “rocket jump”. The truth is that despite of a huge audience of the Digg (9M readers, ~0.8M registered users), the core, which really shapes its content, is very small, probably less than 10,000 active users (tell me I’m wrong if you have different numbers but I guess iPhone story is a very good metric of total number of Digg users who care). This creates enormous opportunity for abuse and I’m surprised it didn’t happen yet.

So with little effort anybody can manipulate Digg or similar social media portal. With these projects hitting the skies nowadays it’s just a matter of time before it will happen. As soon as it happens, the Digg is dead. Bury it.

Update: There is a response from Kevin Rose on this, which is good because it shows that they do work on the problem and, more importantly, feel like sharing it with people. The bad thing is that it seems that they don’t have a solution yet nor any good ideas — removing top users list is something that proves that. I guess that eventually Digg may end up with hiring the top diggers and turning into editorial resource. Casual users will still be able to submit stories, comments etc but they won’t have the power to make them to the front page. This already the case to a certain degree at the moment with the only difference that Digg doesn’t pay to the top diggers so others try to fulfill the gap.