New Media Concepts the Digg Bury Brigade & How to Fight it

New Media Concepts the Digg Bury Brigade and How to Fight it. 9 references and 1 idea.

Digg.com has the bury function for a real and good reason SPAM! Really, we all know it is a problem with any website in one form or another. Yet with Digg the bury feature has fast become a weapon instead of a defense. The Digg bury brigade does exist, the Digg bury brigade is real. Now that we have the simple fact out of the way that the bury brigades are real, let’s make some sense of it shall we?

Digg works based on an algorithm and this system rates more than just a user and a story at a time. Each action cause a chain of reactions and tweaks to virtually every other user and story at once. So how do you fight against a bury mob or bury brigade as a user? Oddly this is rather simple just because of the algo itself, you Digg. Digg unlike Reddit does not have a visible karma system, but Digg does have one in effect. Your over Digg stats plus your comment stats weigh against your bury stats. This give you an algorithmic number equal to a quality score and makes you rank-able vs.. user & stories. Every bury you cast against a user has a diminishing return after a certain point and begins to negatively affect your own acct. The simple solution for a user to beat a bury attack is therefore rather simple. Digg and submit as much as you can handle.

Flooding is effective for many reasons. As the other users repeatedly bury you each bury begins to have less effect on your submissions. Each bury beyond a certain point will also decrease the attacking users ability to be successful on Digg. Wonderfully each submission you make will also dilute the entire balance on Digg and again force your problems diggers and pet troll to need even grater numbers to be successful in their own submission. So Digg hard, Digg heavy and sub like your a giant black & white bears with a big yellow sign. Because the more your a great digger the more your enemies will hurt themselves.

This has been an ongoing issue for some time and in all likelihood will continue. Here are nine fine examples.

Was I just censored by Digg? | The Social Web | ZDNet.com

Was I just censored by Digg?

Posted by Steve O’Hear @ 11:57 am
After the recent discussion about companies offering bribes to Diggers, I thought it would be interesting to run a poll asking if it’s time for the top users to be paid by the social news site itself. I was interested to hear the views of the wider Digg community so I ‘dugg’ the post too. Predictably the story quickly gathered momentum (Digg’s users enjoy stories about Digg), and after approximately 90 Diggs and 40 comments it had hit the front page.
Then seconds later it vanished!

(The odd thing is it still shows up in my profile as the only story I’ve submitted that has ever made it to the homepage.)
Now I know I’ve previously described Digg as a broken democracy, but I’ve never thought of it as a dictatorship. So what had just happened?

Hunting Down Digg’s Bury Brigade Wired.com

Hunting Down Digg’s Bury Brigade

David Cohn 03.01.07
(Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in a different form on NewAssignment.Net, where David Cohn is the blog editor. He is also a Netscape Navigator.)
All is not well in Digg town.

Finding the Bury Brigade — The Hunt is the Most Intriguing Part | NewAssignment.Net

Finding the Bury Brigade — The Hunt is the Most Intriguing Part

by David Cohn on February 28, 2007 – 10:40am.
Not all is well in Digg-town this morning. Yesterday a bug gave one smart Digger the ability to peer into the system and extrapolate the inner workings of the community. Namely, David LeMieux found a way to highlight what users were burying and why.
In about two hours LeMieux got the data on 1,708 buries, fueling growing concern about the benefit of the bury tool in the first place. The “Bury Brigade,” where anonymous groups of users bury Digg stories they find ideologically unappealing, has become common nomenclature.
With all the secrecy around buries, LeMieux’s hacking could provide insight on what is happening inside the community. But it seems even discussions about the bury effect have been closed off.

The Real Reason Behind Digg’s Bury Brigade | bLaugh.com

The Real Reason Behind Digg’s Bury Brigade

Source: Digg Caught Red-Handed
Author: Cartoon Clipart

Watching Digg’s ‘bury brigade’ | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Watching Digg’s ‘bury brigade’

Conclusive proof that certain people are gaming Digg’s front page?
Now, I’m a fan of Digg, the social news site, and last week met up with co-founder Kevin Rose.
Digg’s done very interesting things, and it’s style is being copied by plenty of other groups at the moment.
But the site isn’t without its problems. One of the major ones is the ability of a small number of users to "bury" stories without accountability. Burying news is meant to help separate spam and inaccurate stories from the general morass of ordinary, viable stuff. But there’s long been the suspicion that plenty of users use it to get rid of stories about things they don’t like

Digg’s Kevin Rose Fails To Stop The Bury Brigade SearchEngineLand.com

Digg’s Kevin Rose Fails To Stop The Bury Brigade

Mar 2, 2007 at 8:36am ET by Danny Sullivan
After a week of questions about Digg’s "Bury Brigade," Digg founder Kevin Rose has come in with some public comments about the system and the "alleged" brigade. Unfortunately, they’re just comments — not solutions to protect Digg from the actual brigade I myself can see. More about that in the article below, plus how buries work and can be misused.

Digg Bury Brigade: 28 negative McCain stories buried in 30 days | Web Scout | LATimes.com

Digg Bury Brigade: 28 negative McCain stories buried in 30 days

09:23 AM PT, Aug 11 2008

A close look at campaign-oriented stories on Digg shows that, in the last 30 days, at least 28 stories critical of GOP Sen. John McCain have been mysteriously "buried" — meaning enough Digg users have voted against a story that the submission may no longer appear on the site’s high-traffic front page.
[In our follow up to this post, Digg CEO Jay Adelson responds to the issue.]
Only about five Barack Obama-related stories (positive and negative) were buried in the same period.
According to Digg’s search results, 10 of the 28 McCain stories were zapped after they had already graduated to the front page, including several that had received more than 700 diggs.
The other 18 (all of which had a minimum of 180 diggs by the time I counted them) stalled out in the site’s "Upcoming" section, where stories gain momentum, with the most popular entries eventually graduating to the front.

The Bury Brigade Exists, and Here’s My Proof pronetadvertising.com

The Bury Brigade Exists, and Here’s My Proof

We’ve heard about a purported ‘Bury Brigade’ on Digg time and again, with sketchy pieces of evidence here and there but no concrete proof. Until now.
The Digg.com FAQ describes the ‘Bury Story’ feature as,
Stories can also be removed by users with the ‘Bury Story’ feature within digg. Once a story receives enough ‘buries’ it is automatically removed from the digg Upcoming or Popular sections. The number of reports required to bury is based on a sliding scale that takes several factors into consideration (such as number of diggs, reports, time of day, topic submitted to, etc.).
While that system is supposed to be used to remove superfluous or irrelevant content from Digg, the mechanism is often abused to remove useful and insightful content by malicious users for self-serving and vindictive reasons. My observations are based on data collected by David using a mechanism that he tried to explain to me via email. You can get this data by using the Digg Spy JSON Array:
The Digg Spy Array (set max items to any number)
http://www.digg.com/spy_update?timestamp=11600000
&showtop=2
&showitems=1
&showdiggs=1
&showburies=1
&showcomments=1
&showtop=2
&maxitems=25

ZDNet Not Immune To The “Bury Brigade” | Deep Jive Interests deepjiveinterests.com

ZDNet Not Immune To The “Bury Brigade”

Steve O’Hear, whose blog you should read over at ZDnet on the Social Web, innocently picked up on my post yesterday, and innocently tried to run a poll about whether or not Top Diggers should be paid. Mr. O’Hear catalogued his adventures with interest, because after he set it up, he submitted it (he uses the word “dugg”, but “dugg” is more commonly used to describe “voting” … at least, that’s how I describe it). He goes on to describe what happened next:

Digg Caught Red-Handed Censoring Ron Paul Stories PrisonPlanet.com

Digg Caught Red-Handed Censoring Ron Paul Stories
Self-proclaimed ‘digital democracy’ expunges articles after just a single bury
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, January 17, 2008

UPDATE: After just one bury, this article too was deleted from Digg’s upcoming category.
The self-proclaimed ‘digital democracy’ Digg.com has been caught red-handed artificially suppressing and censoring Ron Paul stories by expunging them from the website with just one bury, despite the fact that thousands of other Digg users are voting the stories up.

Digg allows users to vote stories up (digg them) or vote them down (bury them). The content of Digg’s main page, which receives millions of readers a day, is decided upon this apparently democratic system.

For months allegations have been flying around concerning how stories about Ron Paul, which routinely receive well over a thousand diggs, rarely make it to the main page on Digg as a "popular" item.