Comments on: Microsoft is Policing Digg — Claim

By: ace

ace — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:06:16 +0000

Microsoft is just evil. People need to stop giving business to microsoft. Seriously.

By: lalala

lalala — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:56:22 +0000

twitter, read this comment slowly so maybe you’ll be able to comprehend it. I didn’t claim anything, I was asking a question. Did you not notice the question mark at the end of my comment? Besides, the question was for Roy, not you. Is Roy not able to answer questions directed towards him? Must his friends always answer for him? Is he too scared to answer me for some reason?

Also, the whole “This person doesn’t praise what Roy wrote so he or she must work for MS” thing is old, very old.

By: twitter

twitter — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:48:30 +0000

Nice spin, lalala. When presented with evidence of a corporate effort to bury stories in community media, claim the presenter is paranoid and reframe their argument in a ridiculous way. The traditional names for these are smear and strawman. When M$ spinners dip to that kind of tactic, it is generally because they have nothing better.

By: Sean Tilley

Sean Tilley — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 05:57:44 +0000

I’m mostly bothered by what makes the front page of Digg anymore. Celebrity news, low-brow humour, and Apple’s latest releases. It bothers me that user-submitted news has degraded to the point of being 90% spam. Part of the reason I cancelled my television subscription was to get away from that kind of thing!
FS Daily is fairly good in comparison.

While we’re on topic, though: a lot of social networking sites have equally disappointed me. Myspace, YouTube, and Twitter all now lean dangerously into an overly commercialist style where all celebrities and users alike do is spread advertising for products.

At the very least, there’s identi.ca, FS Daily, TuxMachines, and a few other places that I can get some solid community news from.

By: lalala

lalala — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:08:21 +0000

So everyone that buried your “stories” and comments are Microsoft spinners?

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:51:42 +0000

Indeed, I never have read Digg, reading Slashdot instead.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:43:33 +0000

I never have read Digg, I read Slashdot instead. And ars technica also.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:32:43 +0000

What would you do with such data? Digg is unwilling to put an end to this and so is Slashdot. I think abandoning these sites is a better solution. I have over 3,000 'friends' (mostly people whom I don't know) in Digg, but I abandoned the site after posting over 13,000 comments there (I was the most prolific). There is mod-bombing and personal abuse from Microsoft spinners. See updates #2 and #4 here for example.

By: BroWren

BroWren — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:23:36 +0000

Glad to see you had something up about this.

I’m wondering if there might be some way to prove it using Digg’s APIs – grab the ratings for all stories mentioning GNU/Linux and trend-graph the scores, maybe?

If the data’s available, it might also be interesting to see how many user accounts are common to the burials and if there’s some sort of logic to it, maybe some sort of threshold score at which they start attacking.