Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim mentions a Wired article that exposes the reality of buying diggs. No, not "digs" that make fun of your company, but rather "Diggs" that help send your web site toward a server crashing load of just out of college techies that want to see what the fuss is all about. Much like DMOZ in its prime, Digg likes to claim that there's no way to game the system and that you can't buy your way in. Much like DMOZ in it's prime, Digg is wrong.

The thing about Digg (or any other consumer generated content site) is that certain people rise to a position of power and certain people decide to take advantage of that power. Wired's Annalee Newitz does a great job of laying this out on the line in her article "I Bought Votes on Digg."

I can tell you exactly how a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary made it to the front page on Digg. I paid people to do it.

Annalee put together a pretty lame template-based blog that was about crowds. Yep...crowds. Each blog entry features a picture of a crowd and some poorly written commentary describing it.

For instance, one crowd shot features the following commentary:

I think this crowd is the most natural one I've seen. First of all, everybody looks small so it seems like the right thing for them to be there. Even more, the trees in the background are real nature, and they flow into the people. I'm not sure why the person on the left is standing above everybody else. That's the only unnatural part of this crowd, because he sticks out and faces the wrong way.

Uh huh...yeah, that's Digg worthy.

So once Annalee got the blog up and running, she submitted the site to Digg under a pseudonym. Then she waited. Nothing happened...

Four and a half hours later, I was the only person who had dugg my story. That's when I hired a Digg-gaming service called User/Submitter, or U/S. This enterprise, run by one or more zealously anonymous individuals, advertises that it can help "submitters" get Digg stories noticed by paying "users" to digg them. There's a $20 sign-up fee and each digg costs $1, which gets split evenly between the service and the digger. U/S refunds money paid for any diggs the submitter doesn't get in a 48-hour period. I put down $450 for 430 diggs, but wound up getting refunded all but roughly $100 of that.

As she started to watch what was happening, she saw diggs appearing without any corresponding traffic. In other words, people were digging her listing without visiting the site. She then noticed that many of the people digging her post had also dugg other stories that weren't likely to get attention. She confirmed with one of the owners that he had hired the same firm to get his site dugg.

Ten hours after hiring U/S, I had 40 diggs. The vast majority of them had also dugg the Photoshop tutorial or the $35 offer. This was the moment when I reached a tipping point, and I began to get a lot of organic diggs and comments. The crowd on Digg is drawn to what's popular, and many of them second-guessed themselves when they checked out my blog and saw how crappy it was. Quomen commented, "None of those photographs really appeal to me. Am I defective? or just a loner."

Now with all of that in mind, it's important to note that Digg did eventually police itself. Digg members voted the site buried because they realized that it simply wasn't worthy of anyone's attention. Before that happened however, Annalee managed to get quite a bit of traffic.

User generated content is a great thing, but as noted by Spiderman... with great power comes great responsibility. The next year or so will go a long way toward letting us know just how well that responsibility will be handled.