When a story reaches a certain amount of votes in that 24 hour period it will be published on the frontpage of Digg making it a very popular article throughout the Internet. Digg sends a large amount of visitors to that site as soon as the article hits the frontpage. Besides that other websites report about this story as well and send even more visitors to the site. Most say that the visitors that are send this way are useless for the website. Many website owners fear the Digg effect, the effect that a server crashes due to the load that all the visitors from Digg cause.

The system seems fair at first glance. Every user has one vote and can submit stories. If enough users like the story it gets promoted. This is indeed a fine system if it there were not those users that manipulate the votes either way. Some webmasters will manipulate a system if it furthers their websites. And the votes and stories at Digg can be easily manipulated in two ways.

The first way is the more obvious one. If you need X diggs to make it to the frontpage you create a group of webmasters, friends, relatives and people that get paid to digg to get enough diggs for your article. Whenever you publish a link on Digg you send that group a message and they start digging the story like crazy.

Many webmasters prefer to get digged a lot in the first hour after publishing the article because articles with many votes in a short period of time attract the crowds. Other users will recognize the article and the ball gets rolling.

Many webmasters who manipulate Digg want between 15-30 votes from people they know every time they submit an article to Digg.com and the rest of the necessary votes will be given by the Digg community itself.

The second method manipulates Digg the other way round. Instead of voting on their own stories to give them more diggs those webmasters report stories to digg as “spam or inaccurate” or the like to bury it before it can reach the frontpage. This system works pretty well, let me explain how it can be that articles get buried down just a few minutes after they have been published at Digg.

I personally think that the friend list is the key. If you add someone as your friend you see his submissions, his diggs and comments. Instead of adding real friends you add those webmasters whose stories you want to bury. Whenever such a webmaster posts an article you see it immediately and send an email to your friends who bury the article.

By manipulating articles that deal with a certain topic they can push their articles – the only ones that do not get buried – to the frontpage. This is like creating a monopoly on certain news items on Digg.

Both ways of manipulating Digg have no justification and the Digg team should do everything in their might to prohibit Digg gaming. Instead of burying stories it could be very useful to make it possible to vote negatively for a story which would subtract one positive vote from the article. This would make it much harder to bury articles in the first minutes of appearance.

Someone suggested that Digg should prevent that articles could be voted from direct linking to them but I do not think that this is practicable at all. Many plugins for websites and browsers like Firefox exist that rely on this feature. How many websites have you seen lately that have “digg this” buttons all over their articles ?

Digg could probably analyze gaming patterns and manipulate those accounts as well. Instead of banning them outright their votes would not count anymore. It would be shown but it would not count. Same would apply to buries.

Have another idea ? Let me hear it.