Looks like we have proof of a DiggMob!
http://diggcontest.com/diggmob/

:wink:

It seems fair to me.

All of these PC tech fan sites are cheap, trashy, lazy, and biased. If someone's getting even or cheating, it doesn't surprise me or bother me.

TechReport's frequent Digg requests are annoying. Ads are bad enough but getting passed a collection plate or having some pseudo-journalist beg me for spare change is irritating.

Start your own Bury Brigade. Figure out which articles the current Brigade is trying to artificially inflate, and start burying them. Digg obviously considers the behavior acceptable, so to maintain balance, the Counter-Brigade will need to be formed.

Let's face it: if you've read one hardware review, you've read them all.

http://www.digg.com/search?s=QX6800&area=all&type=both&search-burie...

Welcome to the crowd.

Look at the links that didn't get buried. TR isn't just competing with HardOCP and AnandTech; you're up against a broad spectrum of interests. People already know that the QXZ5 processor is (slightly) faster than the QXZ4; most people tend to digg controversy and/or sensationalism instead. If you want to "win" at Digg, you have to play by the community's rules.

Edit: "Look at the links that didn't get buried" refers to Technology>Hardware, not the myriad QX6800 reviews in the previous link.

Digg is for idiots. TR shouldn't be wasting time with them.

I wrote a long blog post about this phenonmena explaining who's behind it and the rationale, linked it to Digg but it was buried.

Kidding. :p

For anyone who cares about getting the best tech info, most likely people will read a variety of websites rather than read an aggregator of news.
I personally look at this site, Ars Technica, Slashdot, MacRumors, The Inquirer, and a few photoshop related sites, as well as programming websites to get my news.

I took a look at Digg, but the variety of stories was from the mundane to wacky. I'd rather stick to Yahoo/Google News, forum postings, and communications with friends to get stories not related to tech, without the group think mentality.

Nevertheless, big community based websites will always have zealots and weirdos, such as the linux zealots on Slashdot, the people deleting "Everywhere Girl" in the Wikipedia (referring to Jennifer Chandra, a stock image girl that's used in a lot of media, named by the Inquirer), people who defend Apple's premium prices in Mac forums, and so on.

Sorry, but that's why I don't bother with Digg or others like that. I know Slashdot is the granddaddy of them all... but that's the only one I hit. It relies on a core moderating team (as we all know), although the Firehose is coming in to play of late.

I know this is one of my last "stick in the mud", carbon-self attitudes... but it's just the Internet! Solid reviewing and reporting will always have a proper reader base. Depending on fan sites for views probably doesn't give you what you want - an expanding loyal reader base.

Another reason why i dont "digg". Useless gabage and fansite fights. Along with uncanny behaviour.

I can tell you this: there definitely is a youtube bury brigade, and they seem to be uptight christians with lots of free time :/

As for the digg bury brigade, not sure it's a coherent group, give a lot of people the chance to mess with stuff and some will just roll in it like pigs in mud.

wtf exactly does Digg do anyways... all i have gathered is it can help promote a websites (such at TR's) articles and stuff like that. I haven't personally dugg anything yet, as i didn't really know what the heck it was and what exactly i was suppose to do.

plausibly...

Chalk me up as another TR reader who doesn't see the point in TR going Digg.

I read Digg articles whenever I want to see some stupid escapade about how [insert person] inserted some [insert object] up their [insert orifice]. Or if I'm feeling like a masochist and want to read a flame war between right wing neo nazis and left wing libertarians arguing about some military action in some place neither of them know anything about.

If I want tech news, I go to TR. :p

No matter which way it is, my question is thus:

Why would anyone want to bury TR articles? I don't see what the agenda there could possibly be.

Anything that can be influenced by randomly purchased people isn't worth dealing with IMO. Digg just seems like a giant marketing machine.

This was my main reason and concern about the Digg link on the front news page in the first place. I've heard of some groups going around and burying Diggs on purpose and ruining the whole community news by creating an unfair amount of burying to articles that should not be buried. It's kind of like American Idol in some respects, except that on Digg you can vote against certian things and bury them. I mean if there was a way to do a bury on American Idol I think that Sanjaya would've been gone like... ages ago.

Digg is the Cancer that is killing the internet.

I use google reader to capture digg's story feed. Buried stories make it through on the feed. I glance over about 200-300 digg story/headlines a day and probably click through on about 10-20.

No other site comes close giving me that filter and speed of delivery on news.

When Slashdot posted a story years ago about digg, digg's traffic spiked dramatically and soon surpassed /.'s own. That is when I dumped /., which irritated me terribly, and went to digg.

I rarely read /. except for the comments anymore. Their stories are hours/days behind digg's. The comments on digg are filterable so I don't even care about <5.

I've dugg several TR stories, (in fact the only one's I ever have) but I find that the begging for hits gets old and no longer do.

Heh... by posting this story, you've probably increased the odds that future TR submissions will be buried...

I wonder if it is possible to write a bot that has an account on Digg, which can be notified of stories to bury. Create a small botnet of these bots on compromised computers, and you have a person with the power to redirect large numbers of people to certain sites ... or away from others.

You clearly can't overdo this. If you have 50,000 bots, then you only want a random 10% to bury or digg a link. However it seems that's enough.

Digg is such a crap site. I still visit Slashdot for all its myriad flaws, but at least the moderation there works, albeit on posts, not stories.

Clearly Digg's algorithm is quirky. If 1000 users out of a userbase of 10,000 (made up numbers) digg a story, then even if 500 'bury' it, the fact that 10% of the userbase is interested should mean it goes ahead. However I think it is a case of the buriers outnumbering the interested people in a very large 'community'. 5000 buriers in a million user community with varying interests can mean a niche story can be buried before even 10% of the interested 1% have been able to see it.

Evidently, if Digg wants to maintain its position at the top of the linking pyramid, the site ownership is going to have to tighten the screws a la Wikipedia in order to ensure that the rugrats are suitably sandboxed.

I must be too old to find the appeal of Digg. What's the point? Redirecting the masses that can't seem to use Google?

Digg sucks and people that read digg and partake in it's stupid drama suck.

hehehehe

I think it would be prudent to mention that Wired owns Reddit which is a competitor to Digg. The Digg fanboy's say that their reporting is biased.

I've thought Digg was an asinine site from day one, and this proves it.

some people have too much free time.

It's just as bad as astroturfing. A story can be buried to supress its content or a story can be inflated to increase the eyballs on it, both artificially.