March 1st, 2007
Perverse Incentives On Digg
There’s a great, old-fashioned investigative journalism piece on Wired about gaming Digg, which details a successful effort to buy a fake story onto the homepage. Here’s what jumped out at me:
Despite their doubts, Diggers kept digging my blog. There’s a perverse incentive here: Diggers who vote early on stories that become wildly popular become more “reputable” in the Digg system. If you’re trying to move up the Digg ranks, it’s in your best interest to vote on anything that looks like it’s gaining popularity. And my blog, with its flurry of paid votes, fit the pattern.
Wow, a perverse incentive indeed, especially in a system engaged in a life or death struggle against gaming. Perverse incentives for momentum actors sounds like the stock market circa 1999.
I don’t think Digg is headed for a crash, but if their war on gaming forces them to remove many of the incentives from the system (e.g. removal of the top diggers list), you have to wonder whether there will be enough incentives left for the system to function at its current high impact velocity.
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[...] 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 [...]
[...] posts with accompanying pictures dugg to the frontpage. There’s the usual commentary from Digg watchers, including an interesting charge by Mike Arrington that Wired is playing to some strong [...]
Snakes on the train.
Or was it plane, yeah that’s right, a plane “crashes” so… you could say that Digg is a plane that is about to crash? LOL…Boy is this talk of Digg gaming getting tiring in the “SEO community. ;-(
phone service targeted at the youth market, said today that it has rolled out a new mobile device that combines content from web sites like Digg, Wikipedia, Boing Boing, and Metroblogging to its services…. (more) Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0 Perverse Incentives On Digg — There’s a great, old-fashioned investigative journalism piece on Wired about gaming Digg, which details a successful effort to buy a fake story onto the homepage. Here’s what jumped out at me: Despite their doubts, Diggers kept digging my
Wired Reporter Buys Votes on DiggScott Karp / Publishing 2.0: Perverse Incentives On Digg
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
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