Wired reporter Annalee Newitz created an intentionally bogus blog and then bought around $100 worth of diggs through the service user/submitter and proved she could get dugg to “being popular” status.

When I woke up in the morning, my story had been awarded the “became popular” tag and had 121 diggs. U/S had done what it promised: The company had helped me buy my way into Digg popularity, and my site traffic had gone way up — overnight, I’d been hammered with so many hits that the diggers had to set up a mirror. The results of my experience also undermined Digg CEO Adelson’s claim that U/S didn’t work. Adelson could not be reached for comment after the experiment was complete.

People have been debating whether it is right or wrong to buy into popularity for ages. The answer clearly is whether it is right or wrong, it continues to happen. Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is the last paragraph where user/submitter explains how Digg could effectively put them out of business. It’s almost like they are taunting Digg to pull the feature which allows viewing what other people have dugg.

The Second Life search results can and are being abused by a search ranking based on traffic. Recently the ReviewMe service allowed bloggers to set their own prices and break away from the auto-assigned prices that were set based on an estimation of RSS subscribers, Alexa traffic and Technorati rank. This has led to two out of five star blogs with substantially less traffic which formerly were priced around $50-100 like Richi Jennings ($750 per review) charging more than Lifehacker and Boing Boing ($500 per review). I’ve left the prices for reviews here unchanged ($250). I thought about making it something different like $252 or $248, just to be a little different but there’s no way I’d raise the prices primarily to game the search as some folks are doing.

Bloggers en masse should not be raising prices anyway in ReviewMe, we should be lowering them to invite more advertisers into the system which benefits the group as a whole. I think that was the general hope/idea from ReviewMe when they made the prices flexible, not so advertisers could be gouged and the search results gamed.

BTW, ReviewMe could fix their system by ranking sites for advertisers based on blogger actual production, not prices. That means ranking based on successful transactions between advertisers and bloggers. This way prospective advertisers could see what blogs actually were working to provide quality reviews at a fair price versus those who want to overcharge advertisers. I shouldn’t be surprised by guys like Richi Jennings who was the same guy who couldn’t get my name right in a byline awhile back, but go right ahead advertisers and pay him $250 more than Lifehacker! Crazy.

These examples are provided primarily to illustrate that gaming happens all over the place, not only at Digg. Sometimes more obvious than others. The solution is to be wary of packaging online and before investing time and/or money in anything look closer at who is actually working vs. giving the impression that they are working. The two don’t always jive.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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