Get Banned by Gaming Digg

Yesterday I wrote about gaming digg for cash. The concept intrigued me. I was also curious how Digg would be able police this and prevent abuse.

Thus, I decided to try it. I registered an alternate Digg account. Then I registered at User/Submitter. I dugg two articles last night.

When I logged on this morning, there was another article to digg on User/Submitter. I went to digg it, but I got an error message saying "Sorry - bad IP address." Digg caught me!

I figured I could out-smart the system. I setup Tor to I could login to Digg using a different IP address. Yep, I had the solution....

I was able to login using my regular Digg account (I never cheated the system with this account). But when I tried to login using my "gaming" account, I was greeted with this friendly message:

What's the lesson here? Don't cheat Digg. You'll get caught. Your account will be disabled. Your IP will be banned. You'll be stuck using Tor when you want to login and do anything with a valid account. It's a bad plan. Or maybe I'm just not stealthy enough to do it.

Nevertheless, my experiment was fascinating.

Game Digg for Cash

Disclaimer: I'm not advocating this, just making you aware of it.

I've heard about Digg "gaming" before, but I didn't really understand the situation fully until I saw news of this Wired article. Apparently there's a service called User/Submitter which allows a "submitter" to submit a link and pay money for diggs. "Users" then digg that link, earning money for doing so. Talk about a scheme!

To be clear, this blatantly violates Digg's terms of use:

[Y]ou agree not to use the Services: ... with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the 'digg count', blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg's services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg's services.

They go on to say that you can be completely banned from Digg if they discover you're a participant in gaming the system.

But is this much different from rounding up your posse of friends to digg a story for you? We all know that money can virtually buy friends. User/Submitter just takes out the middle man and goes straight from cash to diggs.

I'm not sure how much you can make from this type of "work," but if you're desperate for cash, you don't have much to lose. I personally don't see a huge value to Digg in the first place, so being banned wouldn't be something to cry about. Although it might be kind-of depressing if you only made $1 in the process.