Ted’s Game

Just remember: top diggers do not game the site. Digg rocks and continues to be entirely user powered. Digg relies on such things as sheer quality and honesty. Gotta love digg and the top users.

That is how I concluded the post I was talking about yesterday, kindly published by Garry Conn. Essentially it’s about this little oddity from oddee.com that I have noticed while faithfully following the submission of a well known superdigger. I just can’t stress enough that current internet users must understand once and for all that the hippie days are over, no one does anything without aiming for financial gain of some sort, no one really cares about the “user powered content” concept that was praised and hailed as a revolution in the early days of web 2.0. People, get a clue.

In this particular case (and I’m sure there’s many more that just pass around unnoticed), the aforementioned site (otherwise quite interesting and trustworthy) went on with a dirty little trick and redirected some ip classes from the article that landed up on digg to a page with deceiving similarly titled ads, in the absolutely ridiculous attempt to scoop a few dirty bucks, probably to cover up for some submission costs. (Yeah, I am being an asshole, we all know submissions from top users of digg are free, right?)

On a side note, I must have got someone really mad, because now my blog is presenting every sign of digg cancer: no submission from here, though it hit 30+ natural, non-mutual, non-shared diggs and landed on the “hot news in [topic]” sidebar in the upcoming section in the first hour ever made it past that. My latest video was naturally growing, but it was only on the sidebar for aprox. 45 minutes, while other videos were there for about 19-20 hours. Sure enough, it got buried by the digg auto bury system that doesn’t exist. I am not complaining, this is just a sample of how things work. I don’t need digg and I still love it as a leisure site. I will dare to quote Brian Clark: “But all you social media utopians out there, pay heed. Social media is a reflection of society. Dorks like Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Rose are not about openness and idealism, no matter what load they shovel to the masses. They’re just like anyone else—susceptible to the corrupting influence of quick and unchecked power.” Enough said.

Anyways, long story short, go ahead and read the whole article, with an introduction from Garry that somewhat separates bloggers from diggers and if you want, spread the word by stumbling and sharing.