Ron Paul vs. Digg

I had been meaning to put this up for a while, but it sort of got lost in the shuffle, so it may not be as hot a topic as it was about a month ago (especially given how things have gone for Ron Paul), but I think it is interesting nonetheless. Anyways, a while back, Duncan Riley at Tech Crunch had posted an article questioning why Ron Paul stories had been buried on Digg. He put forward two scenarios, the first one being that the long rumored Digg super users had buried the Ron Paul stories, the second one being that Digg suppressed the stories to support their own agendas. While I certainly wouldn’t want to question the power of the Digg super users, I did come across something that might lead some credence to Duncan’s second theory.

Last year, a service called Subvert and Profit launched, which pays users to vote for articles and websites on Digg and StumbleUpon and videos on YouTube. Subvert and Profit’s clients pay them $2 for each vote on any of the above services, of which Subvert and Profit passes on $1 to the end user. However, in order to protect the identity of their clients as well as to throw YouTube, Digg and Stumble Upon off the trail, the user is given four random items to vote upon in addition to the item that has been paid for. Unfortunately for Subvert and Profit and its clients, this cloaking mechanism doesn’t work too well until you have reasonable scale and diversity of clients. Last month I noticed that each “mission” I received contained one Ron Paul link among a bunch of links that I would have a hard time imagining anybody paying to have bumped. Clearly Ron Paul or perhaps a fervent Ron Paul supporter had been attempting to promote these articles. I would assume that if Digg is as “committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing” as they say they are, they would likely have several Subvert and Profit accounts to keep an eye on who is buying votes and probably wouldn’t be too hesitant to bury articles that have been given an unfair advantage.