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Beware of the Denial of Digg attack
For bloggers and site operators, Digg is a great tool to attract visitors to your website, but as the service is attracting more visitors, the company is tweaking its service to prevent manipulation and outright fraud. Some of those measures however create an opportunity for a new kind of fraud.
Digg's largest problem is that people will use multiple accounts to get their submissions lots of votes and have them promoted to the front page, where they'll get loads of visitors.
The site battles this by banning such accounts. Users furthermore can flag stories as dupes or inaccurate, where a certain number of flags will result in removal from the front page, instead demoting the Digg to a naughty folder.
A third anti-gaming measure however could be pure gold for anyone who's seeking to hit his competitors: Digg will blacklist entire URLs if they are repeatedly linked to manipulation schemes.
The scenario is as follows: I have 50 Digg accounts and use those to submit and promote stories from my blog . Digg will find out and ban the accounts. But I'm the stubborn type and create another 50 accounts, and another 50. Digg will respond by blacklisting my blog's URL, preventing any stories from getting submitted. Problem solved.
But now I'm competing with another blog, and I just hate their guts. So instead of promoting my stories, I'll promote theirs, over and over again. Until Digg blacklists their URL. Now I've cut off a very welcome source of traffic.
Let's call it the "Denial of Digg" attack.
Tags: digg, denial of digg attack, web2.0, manipulation
April 21, 2006 at 09:10 PM | Permalink
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Comments
"Digg is a great tool to attract visitors to your website"
Digg is a science and technology news site, not an internet welcome center.
Posted-by: | 21 Apr 2006 21:27:34
No its not an Internet welcome centre. Did you read this story? The site is open for abuse and this is an interesting story about how bloggers that don't like your blog or compete with it can use digg to ban your URL etc !
Posted-by: Kurtz | 23 Apr 2006 07:53:11
Spanish
