I'd like to try and out the advertisers and marketing firms on digg (and maybe even Netscape, who knows) that are paying folks to submit news for them. If you know of a firm doing this send me their name, the email they sent you, the URL of the story on digg/netscape, and/or who they are paying.
If your tip pans out I'll send you $100 via paypal. Yep, I'll pay you for ratting these folks out.
I will also keep your submission 100% confidential.
Also, if you've been paid for doing this in the past I'll also keep your information 100% confidential. Remember, I don't work at Netscape any more so I'm basically a very interested 3rd party. I just want to understand what these folks are doing.
You can send the emails to my personal account jason at calacanis dot com.
Again, 100% confidential. Let the madness begin. :-)
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Reader Comments
(Page 1 of 1)2. Jason, I respect what you're trying to do here. Just know that by offering to pay for a tip, you are inviting people with shaky proof of this activity to send it to you in the hopes of getting $100. The simple fact that you're paying for this information will make it less credible. (Whistle-blowers don't get paid, otherwise everyone would be trying to dig up dirt on their bosses.)
Granted, $100 isn't a lot of cash, but still, this is why journalists don't pay sources.
3. User/Submitter (http://www.usersubmitter.com/). Pay them $20 plus $1 for each digg (you tell them how many diggs you want) and they have registered Digg users that they contact that will digg the story for you. Diggers get paid 50 cents for every 3 stories they digg.
Crazy.
Sheila
Posted at 1:00PM on Dec 12th 2006 by Sheila
6. As Sheila has already pointed out, UserSubmitter is one such network. In fact, I had made a post about this on my blog at http://nice-ideas.blogspot.com/2006/11/proof-of-digg-abuse.html
I dugg it myself to show diggers on how Digg is being abused. Surprisingly, when the stories that I had specifically pointed out as manipulated still got diggs in 100s, my story still has got only 25 diggs to date..
The Digg story is here at http://digg.com/tech_news/ATTENTION_PROOF_OF_DIGG_ABUSE
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1. I think this post is pretty thought provoking. It is a quick profile of Digger #39 and the site he submitted 147 times over the last two months (of a total of 150 submissions):
http://www.naffziger.net/blog/index.php/2006/12/09/what-your-alexa-stats-would-look-like-after-20-diggs-in-30-days/
You also may find this post interesting: among other things, it highlights a few domains where 1 digger has submitted a site an inordinate number of times.
http://www.naffziger.net/blog/index.php/2006/12/09/which-sites-do-the-top-diggers-read/
Both stories were buried on Digg (the latter after receiving 630 diggs).
Dave
Posted at 12:22PM on Dec 12th 2006 by Dave