Wired vs. Digg
So I read most of the article by Annalee Newitz in Wired.
I can tell you exactly how a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary made it to the front page on Digg. I paid people to do it. What’s more, my bought votes lured honest Diggers to vote for it too. All told, I wound up with a “popular” story that earned 124 diggs — more than half of them unpaid. I also had 29 (unpaid) comments, 12 of which were positive.
Interesting stuff. Especially if you know, as Mike Arrington points out, Wired’s parent company owns reddit (one digg’s biggest competitors).
Wired Magazine seems hell bent on convincing the world that Digg is falling apart. I have a problem with that because Wired Magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, owns Digg competitor Reddit. And because Wired isn’t just reporting Digg news - they are actively engaged in using Wired to undermine Digg.
I’m not as up-in-arms as Arrington is. But he has a point. Wired should have more prominently disclosed that their parent company owns a digg competitor. Or, better still, they should have tried gaming all the big social news sites (delicious, digg, netscape and reddit).
In the end I think that digg supporters are shooting the messenger though. She was able to game the system and in the process expose the herd mentality of digg.
tags: digg, social news
Posted by Doug
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