User/Submitter: Unfairly Gaming the System
After yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article about “The Wizards of Buzz”, there has been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere surrounding the impact of social bookmarking sites. One site, User/Submitter tries to game the system by paying diggers to digg articles that are submitted by paying users. I have a feeling that this site will receive similar feedback to Payperpost prior to their forced disclosure rules. I wonder how many diggers have already decided that they are willing to game the system, and how many pay. Either way, this system can’t be allowed to continue much longer without forced disclosure, in the form of an appended title or description when digging. A third but less likely alternative is for Digg to add on a check box when digging that asks whether or not this is a sponsored posting. If User/Submitter becomes an accepted practice (which I seriously doubt it will be), what is stopping Digg from becoming a sponsored posting broker? Sites like Techmeme already successfully do this, why not Digg?