Subvert and Profit. Another attempt to game digg
By Arpit On Wednesday, April 04, 2007 At 8:26 AM
A new site has evolved from nowhere* to help people in getting there story to front page of digg. And they are selling there help.
Subvert and Profit who refer themselves as new black market, charge advertisers $1 for each digg and pays the digger $0.5 per paid digg. Also they are offering a deal of $0.75 per paid digg to first 500 diggers who join there gang.
There has been similar sites on net in the past(like this), but most of them failed to protect their users' privacy. This new S&P site claims that they've engineered new tricks that will make their users' activity appears normal.
Quoted from their blog:
- Our algorithm selects users to Digg a story based on how unrelated they are in terms of their Digging history. This is key, because one of the primary methods of detecting “gaming behavior” is seeing if the same group of users Diggs the same stories repeatedly.
- We hide the story you are paid to Digg in a short list of randomly selected stories that you will Digg as well. These stories also show up with the same relative frequency as the paid stories. This prevents Digg from making accounts on our site to see which stories are paid for, and then banning the users who vote for them.
- We never link directly to Digg.
- We verify our users’ Digg activity through a complex string of proxies.
And there was something funny (or not so funny) in there blog. The blog has two post till now which are signed as ' Posted by Ragnar Danneskjold and Vasili Taleniekov'
I know about Ragnar Danneskjold. A famous character from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. And when I did a quick Wiki search on Vasili Taleniekov, I found this:
Vasili Vasilivich Taleniekov, the man called The Serpent, master strategist, KGB, the Soviet Union's most brilliant intelligence tactician, is both executioner and negotiator, hunter and quarry. He has spent twenty-five years in ruthless pursuit of Moscow's enemies. He, too, is tired and weary of the futility of the intelligence community, but there is no one better in all of Russia.
*Also In the end of there FAQ, the answer for Who are you? is:
We are whomever you want us to be. We come from nowhere and we are everywhere.
They are creating a buzz on web right now. But lets see how far they go. I doubt...... :)
Technorati Tags:subvert and profit, digg, s&p
Labels: Money, News and announcements, Others
Unless they're all talk, Subvert and Profit seems more advanced than its predecessors. I think they stand a chance at manipulating Digg successfully. They probably use code names so people like you blog about them. Anonymity behind a company like this adds to the allure and adds more press coverage. We'll see how Subvert and Profit performs! For now, the people who doubt Subvert and Profit are just as much "all talk" as Subvert and Profit seems "all talk" right now.
Johnathon, the only thing which will decide S&P survival is how efficiently they protect their users' identity.
Any such attempt in the past has just lead to banned digg accounts.
But still this time things seems to be bit different.
Yep,there were quite a few issues with banning accounts,which doesn't do them any good rap
Good article!
Thank you!