[ Thanks to Bernard Swiss
for this link. ]
“Those of us who follow Digg have long known that Digg
has long been susceptible to external gaming. While Digg’s leader
Kevin Rose has tried to keep this type of thing from happening, the
company’s biggest efforts to clean up its social bookmarking system
have ended up vexing some of its biggest fans. In the meantime, as
Digg Patriots has shown, Digg’s popularity contest for stories
remains easy to corrupt.“I strongly suspect, although I am not able to prove as Olson
has, that other groups use similar techniques to ensure that
stories about technologies they hate, like Linux, almost never
become popular. In turn, this means far fewer people will ever see
stories about Linux. Friends who also write regularly about Linux
and open source tell me they see this happening.”I can tell you when this started– April 2009. Before then,
I could post Linux Planet stories on Digg and they would rise or
fall on their own merits. Some did very well and became popular,
some did OK, and a few didn’t get much attention. After April 2009
every Linux story I posted got buried within a couple of hours. The
troll gangs rule Digg. –ed.