Practical Technology

A liberal blogger has uncovered that a “group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com has just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, up-vote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives.” The blogger, Ole Ole Olson, infiltrated a group that called itself Digg Patriots. His proof is quite damning.

Those of us who follow Digg have long known that Digg has long been susceptible to external gaming. While Digg’s leader Kevin Rose has tried to keep this type of thing from happening, the company’s biggest efforts to clean up its social bookmarking system have ended up vexing some of its biggest fans. In the meantime, as Digg Patriots has shown, Digg’s popularity contest for stories remains easy to corrupt.

I strongly suspect, although I am not able to prove as Olson has, that other groups use similar techniques to ensure that stories about technologies they hate, like Linux, almost never become popular. In turn, this means far fewer people will ever see stories about Linux. Friends who also write regularly about Linux and open source tell me they see this happening.

In early 2009, new popular Linux stories would pop up every day or two on Digg. By mid-2010, Linux stories on Digg became popular only once every week or so. Why? Has everyone who once interested in Linux suddenly vanished? Have people stopped writing about Linux? I don’t think so.

More >