Tricking the social voting sites

Geek reporter Annalee Newitz has a nice pair of articles on Wired News this morning about the way that scammers manipulate community voting sites like eBay, Yahoo Stores and Digg. In the first one, Herding the Mob, Newitz describes a variety of techniques used to manipulate rankings, focusing on pyramid schemes where, for example, Diggers get paid to vote for each others' stories, or do so in exchange for a promise that their own submissions will get the same treatment.

In the second story, I Bought Votes on Digg, Newitz details a "scientific prank" in which she uses a votes-for-cash scheme to buy her way onto the front page of Digg and describes the problems with Digg's own immunoresponse to the voting.

Clay Shirky once said something like "social software is anything that attracts spam" -- these problems are endemic to all social services, not Digg. To my mind, the problem with communities that devote themselves to rating their own members' contributions is that they often create a mean-spirited environment. You can use Slashdotters' rankings to find useful posts in their message boards, but it's rare to find a friendly discussion there. I think that there's something inherently dysfunctional in devoting yourself to judging your peers.

Then there’s Spike the Vote, a sort of Digg-based pyramid scheme in which members earn one point every time they digg an endorsed story. Once members have enough points, they can submit stories of their own to be dugg by the network.

Recently, Spike the Vote’s owner, known only as Spike, sold the site on eBay. A Digg user named Jim Messenger bought the site and gave it to Digg, which promptly shut it down. But Messenger wasn’t just being altruistic. He bought Spike the Vote because he knew Digg’s followers would put a story about what he had done on Digg’s front page. This, he figured, would attract customers to his search engine optimization business.

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