The broker always makes money Saturday, October 07, 2006
User/submitter is a way to get your blogpost a high Digg ranking - pay people to Digg it! The submitter pays the service a fee of $20 + $1 per Digg and they in turn pay each User 50c for each 5 Diggs. As you've spotted, that's not a bad fee in the middle for the broker and hence open to be squeezed. Likewise, for the Users that's not a massive fee for the effort, particularly given the Digg interface, but then I guess to some folks its still easy money with little skill required!
As you'd expect, many folks aren't happy with the notion of people gaming the system in this manner. But then again, I seem to recall many stories suggesting about 100 users pretty much controlled what made the front page (effectively through a Digg network of promoting each other).
Certainly buying influence seems seedy and may undermine the quality of stories that may it onto the front page (may only need to spend $70-$100 which is cheap to a corporate).
Problem, is you won't know whether an article on the front page of Digg got there with or without payment and hence a shadow of mistrust may hit everyone! Of course, if you hate a story you can undigg it.
posted by John Wilson @ 5:01 PM Permanent Link
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