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.

Over the past year or so — ever since it became one of the red-hot social networking sites, and co-founder Kevin Rose one of the new poster boys for Web 2.0, thanks in part to BusinesssWeek’s recent cover story — Digg.com has been critcized for being “rigged,” in the sense that a small group of Diggers (Rose included) seem to have a disproportionately large effect on what gets voted to the front page of the site, and what doesn’t (more discussion here and here).

One of the latest pieces to bring this up is here, and a follow-up post about how the original post suspiciously (apparently) disappeared from Digg is here. I’m not sure whether it’s worth noting that the blog in question is hosted at infogami, which merged with Reddit, a competitor of Digg’s. Paul Graham, the angel investor who funded both, has also criticized Digg in the past.

These kinds of reports have had an air of believability about them, although it’s difficult to tell whether Digg was being deliberately rigged or “gamed” and whether some of it was just the nature of the beast (as discussed here). As Rose explained in one somewhat exasperated post, he Diggs stories his friends submit sometimes — big deal (I’m paraphrasing). In any case, some of the repeated criticism must have struck a chord, because the Digg founder explained today that the site is instituting some changes to try and prevent the kind of clique effect or gaming that has been alleged.

In a nutshell, the Digg algorithm is going to lower the “juice” given to stories that appear to be Dugg by a small group, and top Diggers will also be sorted by how diverse the things they have dugg happen to be. I think that’s a great idea — it will be interesting to see what kind of effect it has on Digg’s results.

Update:

At least one top Digger isn’t pleased with the rejigging: P9 is leaving. Jason Calacanis of the re-Diggified Netscape agrees with him, not surprisingly, and says the top Diggers should be rewarded (presumably with cash) rather than hamstrung by such manoeuvres. Mike Arrington says that Diggs that come from the top stories page should count for more than Diggs that come direct, which is an interesting idea.

Jay Adelson of Digg has also responded to the controversy in comments on some of the stories that have been submitted to Digg about the whole issue, in which he said:

The mistake we made was not being clearer that we were not associating the algorithm change with the top submitters. These guys are hard working, honest contributors to digg and are being unfairly scapegoated. Please stop with the targeted burying… Digg what you like, bury what you don’t. We’ll take care of the abusers.