Digg
Wired’s Digg slam is offside
The story in Wired magazine entitled “I bought votes on Digg” shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone. Not only has the service used by the author — an automated voting system called User/Submitter — been written about before, but anyone who has paid any attention over the past six months to a year knows that there are problems with the Digg model.
The site has had issues with people “gaming” it pretty much since inception, and there has been a back-and-forth battle between Kevin Rose, Digg spammers and the top Digg submitters for some time now. Digg recently removed the top Diggers list in an attempt to cut down on the incentive for gaming, but as Scott Karp notes in a recent post at Publishing 2.0, there is still an incentive to vote up sites like the fake blog that Wired cooked up for its story, because doing so gets you reputation points if the link becomes popular and moves to the front page. Muhammad Saleem of The Mu Life has written about these issues many times.
So the Wired magazine piece isn’t exactly a surprise. That wouldn’t be noteworthy, except for the fact that — as Mike Arrington at TechCrunch reminds us — Wired magazine is part of a publishing company, CondeNast, that owns one of Digg’s main competitors: namely, Reddit. The story mentions the ownership issue parenthetically, but I still think it’s offside. Unlike Mike, I don’t think Digg should sue Wired, but I do think it looks bad for a magazine to cook up an event to make a company look bad, and then write about that event, when a sister company is a major competitor.
I would compare the story written by Annalee Newitz (a freelance writer who used to be a policy analyst with the Electronic Freedom Foundation, according to the bio on her blog) with the kind of “sting” that newspapers write when they sneak knives aboard a plane to show how lax security is. The only difference, of course, is that in most of those cases, the newspaper’s parent company doesn’t own a competing airline.
Wired’s piece for me crosses a line. If the story had been about some neutral third party that hired User/Submitter, then that would be one thing. But Wired effectively perpetrated the sting itself, and that smells bad to me.
Update:
Ms. Newitz’s story is a companion piece to this article entitled “Herding the Mob,” which is about reputation hacking on sites like Digg and eBay. There’s also a third piece about Digg by another author that is part of the same package, called “Hunting Down the Bury Brigade.”
Further reading:
Ed Felten of Freedom to Tinker has some worthwhile thoughts about manipulating reputation systems here, and Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests — also a veteran Digg watcher — has a post here. Frantic Industries also thinks Wired is playing on the wrong side of the tracks with this one, and Robyn Tippins at Sleepyblogger takes a crack at it as well.
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I think the Wired story is fine. In part that’s because Digg management said the site couldn’t be gamed, so I think it’s perfectly good journalism to test that claim.
To suggest that Wired should not write about Digg, or only write about it in a positive light, because it shares the same parent company with Reddit is something I can’t agree with you on.
As long as their facts are correct, I see no problem. It’s a good piece of journalism, actually.
It may not have been the best move on Wired’s part but I’m glad we finally have solid proof of gaming Digg. I hate the fact that Jay and Kevin keep denying the issue exists.
I think that the biggest “offense” by Wired here is simply pushing the subject too hard for their own good. It’s a big publication, it shouldn’t be spending 2 stories a day and 5 stories a week just to make the competition look bad. And I don’t mean that just from the ethical standpoint, I mean that from a professional standpoint: do readers of Wired really care about the bury brigade so much that they want to read about it twice or thrice a day?
Dominic, you’re putting words in my mouth. I’m not saying Wired shouldn’t write about Digg, nor am I saying that the magazine shouldn’t write about how the site can be gamed. But I think deliberately hiring someone to try and game the site crosses a line. You obviously disagree, and that’s fine.
And Anonymous, I don’t think either Jay or Kevin have “denied that the issue exists.” All the comments I’ve read, including the ones in the Wired piece, acknowledge that people try to game the site. But Jay and Kevin argue that they never really succeed — although I guess that depends on your definition of success.
I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth, just misunderstood what you were saying.
Still, I don’t know how they could have done the story without hiring the firm that sells votes. Digg management boasted that they had solved the problem and Wired sought to test that claim and wrote their story.
To me it’s the same as if the Globe and Mail had done an investigation into TELUS and its customer service issues a while back. Management claimed they were fixing the problems. If the Globe wanted to test those claims, it would probably have to open accounts with TELUS, spend some money and then use the customer service lines to see how well they worked. Is that not a legitimate way to test management’s claims that the problems have been fixed? I think it is.
But for someone to then say the Globe should not do such a story because it’s parent was BCE Inc., which owns Bell Canada, a competitor to TELUS, is the same as saying Wired should not do investigative reporting on Digg because it’s parent owns Reddit.
One other claim I find somewhat weak is that Reddit is a major competitor to Digg. It’s a competitor, but surely it’s not “major.”
It’s just my opinion, but I can’t see how a publication like Wired could ignore such an obvious story about such a prominent technology company like Digg.
I suppose that’s a fair comparison, Dominic — although I have to say that I think the relationship between Reddit and Wired is a lot closer than between the Globe and Bell Canada.
And I still think cooking up that kind of story isn’t the type of thing a media outlet should do if it wants to remain as conflict-free as possible. I’m not saying the Globe wouldn’t do a story like that, but if asked I would argue against it.
Hi Matt, while at first I thought the same as you, a little reflection made me think of my hypocracy - the interesting thing is that we still hold traditional media to different standards than we hold ourselves to.
When it comes to conflicts of interest - we state that as long as we disclose and are transparent - we’ve acted ethically.
As far as I can tell - the story did both - right in its text copy and not off on some page that would take work to find.
Either we agree that these are the rules of the road - or they are not.
Karl, I’m not sure it’s that simple. Yes, Wired declared its conflict of interest — but I’m not sure that’s enough.
Like I said, I’m not saying Wired can’t write about Digg, or even criticize Digg — I think they should go ahead and do that as much as they want. It’s the fact that they are making up the news, if you will, rather than just reporting it.
And rather than holding the traditional media to lower standards, why not hold ourselves to higher standards?
You’re right - we should hold ourselves to a higher standards.
But try and make that argument and see where it gets ya :)
I’ll buy you a cheese steak if you get some traction with it :)
I think part of the story here is that the gaming of Digg and Digg’s problems have long been circulating among the Digg bloggers.
Wired is one of the tech magazines that diggers like to read.
Reddit? A competitor to Digg? They are as much of a Digg competitor as this blog is to the New York times!
Digg came out and said, “you can’t game us, we have mad skillz, go away you hackers!”
Someone called them on it, “Look, I got this crappy site on the Digg homepage!”
Then Digg turns around and says, “Hey, I wasn’t ready, that didn’t count.. Wait a minute… You are from a competitor… discredit! discredit! discredit!”
They did the same thing when a blogger reproduced the top 100 list after they dumped it!
HMTKSteve, are you suggesting that my blog doesn’t compete with the New York Times? :-)
And Karl, I will take you up on your wager — but you can keep the cheese steak, thanks.
I think it is more a case of the New York Times not seeing you as a competitor.
Think of Great Cthullu. The humans on the planet are not even a thought to him. To the humans on the planet, he holds a very large place in the thoughts of the people!
“I have to say that I think the relationship between Reddit and Wired is a lot closer than between the Globe and Bell Canada.”
Agreed.
It seems a question of editorial judgment. You’d be the editor that would’ve frustrated the hell out of me in my younger years, but I do see your point about the optics of aggressively going after a story when you’re potentially in a conflict of interest position.
Personally, I’d do the story and not worry about the optics. But I’d be extra careful to be sure we got the facts right.
But to your point, Wired did pay a price in terms of reputation for doing the story. Even if I think the critics are wrong, they did enough to call Wired’s editorial integrity into question.
And I’m not sure it was worth it.
The specific problem does seem to be pretty widespread. User/Submitter has been around for months, and are buying diggs for about one story an hour.
Here are a list of a few recent ones:
http://lukewelling.com/2007/03/03/diggs-kevin-rose-has-an-account-on-usersubmitter/