Spike the Vote joins blogosphere axis of evil (or the social news black list)

Filed under: Netscape

Today SpikeTheVote joins PayPer~~Scam~~Post in my Internet axis of evil. The site is a place for folks to trade their votes on the social news site digg. The person creating the system says they will be going after Netscape next.

Warning: anyone using these systems on Netscape will have their account *and* domain banned from Netscape. We will catch you using these systems by watching voting patterns or having insiders forward us information, so I highly recommend folks do not engage these scams. If you are a fan of social news please understand that it is a privilege to engage in these systems, and if you do something destructive you will lose that privilege.

I know Kevin and digg take a hands off approach to policing the site, but at Netscape we take an ACTIVE role in cleaning our site. In two seconds we can ban "SPAMMERDOMAIN.COM" for 30 days, 3 months, a year, or indefinitely. When a spammer comes into the system we ban it. We put these folks into the same category. Your vote has value, but you can't sell your vote in the democratic systems or it turns into a marketplace. We are not a marketplace--we're a social news site.

I'm going to ping Kevin and see if he will join me and creating a social news black list to put any domains from SpikeTheVote into. We can have our tech teams share a common domain name and URL list of banned stories/sites in about... ummm... an hour. So, if folks are serious about creating these scam sites we will get serious about banning them.

Note: In a related story PayPerPost says they are going to clean up their act soon. If it is anything short of complete disclosure at the top of every paid post and 100% disclosure that is unacceptable and it will fail.

Note2: Technorati is becoming so filled with spam it is sad. It feels like 90% of the spam is from scrapper sites on blogspot.com.

Oct 19th 2006 10:38AM
Permalink
Email this
Linking Blogs
Comments [7]

Reader Comments

(Page 1 of 1)

1. What happens when someone registers under someone else's domain? The new part of Spike The Vote is most of the stories it tells you to vote up aren't from members of the site (and you never find out which ones are) but there is nothing to stop someone from putting a story from calacanis.com into the queue. If you start blocking these sites forever, all someone has to do to punish a competitor is sign them up. Blackhat!

Posted at 12:22PM on Oct 19th 2006 by Jon Gales

2. John Gales is exactly right. If you start banning all domains at Spike the Vote, 80% of your bans will be wrong. From Spike the Vote's FAQ:

"Why does 1 Digg on my own story cost 5 points? Shouldn't everything be even?

The 5:1 ratio is necessary to keep things anonymous. Legitimate stories submitted by this community are mixed with random stories to confuse Digg moles. If a Digg mole decides to register for an account on this site to find cheaters, they will have an 80% chance of getting it wrong."

Posted at 12:48PM on Oct 19th 2006 by eddie

3. Isn't amazing? Scum and villany can innovate too.

Posted at 2:26PM on Oct 19th 2006 by Victor Agreda Jr

4. I assume that a data sharing agreement with the Rose family is an easy one for you to make, since they have already been setting up a defense with research hours logged and data (with history) available. If it was reversed, and you had the larger set of data, the larger brand, and your smaller competitor came to you asking to coordinate defensive efforts, would the decision be as easy? It's like giving away free business intelligence. Once Netscape.net has been targetted by a large group and done its due diligence, then you'd have something to bring to the table.

Perhaps approach other sites like Newsvine, Fark, or Reddit to see if they are interested too. The more parties involved the easier your collaborative efforts would be, as well as recruiting efforts towards other networks. It might even be worth growing an authoritative alliance/association to police "Best Practices for Social Networks" since this could be the first of many unforseen threats.

Posted at 3:19PM on Oct 19th 2006 by jasonmurphy

5. "they will have an 80% chance of getting it wrong." This is the spin that those selling spots on those sites would have you believe, but you are forgeting the human and the proffessional factor when you say this. There are submitters to both of those sites that clearly know the difference between a legit story and a spam story. I would say then that the chances flip flop to nearly 100% correct with some clever debate with other proffessional submitters. Remember the top users have a very good idea of what the world likes, we can tell the difference in a fraud story, believe me. Jason I think a panel of top users would work well in this situation, i.e. your Navigators from Digg, Reddit and Newsvine.

Posted at 4:44PM on Oct 19th 2006 by wayjer

6. So, what's different about this "gaming" as compared to your practice of PAYING people to submit stories? Pleae enlighten us, oh egocentric one.

Since Digg remains completely voluntary, completely social, the threat is unique to them.

Netscape is already a bit player throwing money at top Digg users to attempt a carbon-copy. The way to get stories on the front of Netscape is much more straight forward.

Oh, and aren't you proud that "Netscape" has become the adjective applied to tech companies who may become obsolete? :)

Posted at 7:23PM on Oct 19th 2006 by Erich D.

7. Care to link to the "related story" where "PayPerPost says they are going to clean up their act"?

Thanks

Posted at 8:20AM on Oct 20th 2006 by Lynn Terry

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry: inappropriate or purely promotional comments may be removed. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.