A Social News Site That Can’t Be Gamed
Digg, Linkbait, Social Media, Social News, WikipediaComments OffWith all this chatter about people asking each other for Diggs, Spinns, Del.icio.us saves, Reddit votes and…Propellers, wouldn’t it be nice to have a social news site that was unsusceptible to gaming? With that said let’s take a look at Digg and combine its current model with new anti-gaming ideas.
1. First we need to look at how Digg votes are attained:
- Inside the Digg system: via natural user interaction and by ‘shouting’ to your friends
- Outside the Digg system: via sending the story URL to potential voters via IM and/or email
For this new system to work, we would have to filter which votes were attained inside the system alone. If a user were to access the story URL from an outside referral address, the vote wouldn’t count.
2. What if someone just creates multiple user accounts with unique IP addresses?
You could deter this tactic by ignoring votes that come from users who enter in a story’s URL directly without first accessing the main site. In order for a vote to be considered, there would have to be evidence of a bread crumb trail or a referral address within the system. If the user is on www.domain.com and enters in www.domain.com/story and there’s no link on www.domain.com to www.domain.com/story, the site would ignore the vote.
3. What if someone arrives on the site, logs in, searches for the story’s title, and then votes?
Voting using this method would work, but the weight of this vote would be less than 1. More like .25.
Implementing simple voting caps like this might ensure the integrity of the content’s actual popularity. The Digg community already does a pretty bang-up job at separating the wheat from the chaff but even if the content is valuable or interesting and deserving of votes, it can still be gamed. Once a story goes popular then a mob mentality sets in. People think that since a story has received (X) votes in (X) time then it must be something that deserves their attention and probably a vote. Often, this exaggerated popularity can push even mediocre content to a more prominent position within the site.
However, preventing the exaggeration of a story’s popularity on Digg could turn off some users. Social sites that gain enormous popularity seem to have a good balance at appealing to both the average end user and those who wish to influence them. If the influencers could no longer leverage a site, traffic might drop, even while the improved gauge of actual popularity could bring more/new users to the site.
Wikipedia is a site that is extremely difficult to employ for marketing purposes and is not the medium of choice for most influencers. Nonetheless, Wikipedia was receiving 917,000 hits per day as long ago as October 2004. Wikipedia was built on user participation and our need to document knowledge. Because of this the perceived integrity and value, Wikipedia enjoys great popularity.
Overall, improving the filters that maintain voting integrity within Digg may not only prevent gaming, but could also increase traffic by boosting the site’s perceived value.
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