i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

During last class, while Bob was talking about bad tagging techniques, he wondered why would anybody tag a bookmark on Delicious "tagthis?" A big banner in red started flashing in my mind saying: "Gaming The System" Looking deeper into the issue, "tagthis" seems to be more innocuous than I first imagine. Apparently it was generated by tagth.is, a service that bookmarks links in tweets. This however does not deny the fact that social news networks are being actively gamed by a small but extremely devoted group of people.

When I say "Gaming Social News Networks," I mean the  manipulation of social news networks to inflate the importance of a link, account, news story, or to push a certain agenda. A core group of users, who usually overlap over a broad spectrum of social news networks, actively engage in this activity on a a daily basis. These users are usually called "power users." Which I think is a misnomer, but thats another discussion.

So how does it work? Gaming techniques differ from social news network to another. But all of them seem to share the use of back rooms of communication among users. E-mail, chat rooms in Skype & IRC, instant messaging, and direct messaging on Twitter are the main vehicles to ask for votes up, retweets, thumbs up, diggs, or bookmarking from other "power users." The more influential the network in terms of traffic it sends, the more "power users" engage in this back room sharing, but generally, most of these users engage on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Twitter. 

Now to be clear, not all "gaming" is bad. Links are not created equal, good content will always trump bad & spammy content. The community of "power users" understand that. Users who try to push spam, are usually quickly exposed and promptly marginalized. With that in mind, "Power Users" can be a boon to a social news network by finding great content and push it to the top and give it the exposure it deserves. Also, there is only so much a "power user" can do. All networks have procedures to mitigate spam. So all a "power user" can do is give their story enough exposure so that the general populace of the network push it over the top if they like it, or kill it if its bad or spammish.

So whats spam on a social news network? There are many shades of grey if you want to define spam. Is it spam if a "power user" submits their own blog? Is it spam if one grabs an image puts it on their blog with no commentary and submits it? Is it spam if a user submits a list of "top ten X pictures," and puts each image on a separate page to get more pageviews? The right answer here is that it is different for each community. With time, unwritten rules evolve on each network.  Reddit for example is notoriously known for submitting screen caps instead of links of sites they don't want to support so they don't get any traffic from them. And Digg hates affiliate links.  

Over the years, there have been a lot of controversey over "power users." The Digg community has made "revolts" a bi-yearly sport. They revolted against their most powerful user MrBabyMan, and they revolted numerous times against "power users." The main complaint was that "power users" get all the "glory" once their stories hit the first page, while the regular users' same submission would barely get a digg or two. Reddit also had problems with their moderators abusing their power (trying to find a reference link.)

Update: I forgot to mention that there are services specially designed to buy diggs and votes. Here is a Reddit example. I have seen many Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious ones too!

Update 2: Here is a Redditor explaining how he managed to build his own botnet to simulate real users and influence social media. Awesome read.

Related stories:

Why MrBabyMan is King of All Media

Top Digg User Zaibatsu Banned - Reactions from Both Zaibatsu and Digg Management

Digg investigates claims of conservative 'censorship'

How do you become a StumbleUpon power user? Ask a 16 year old

Cracking the Digg code | CNET News <--- A little self-promotion here. This is about me

The Rigging Of Digg: How A Covert Mob Of Conservatives Hijacked The Web’s Top Social News Site