Reddit lifts its ban on "The Atlantic" The Atlantic has returned to Reddit.
How Reddit's cofounders built Reddit with an army of fake accounts. Here’s an interesting revelation from Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman: The social news site was built on a lie.
Many hundreds of lies, to be more specific, in the form of fake user accounts that Huffman and fellow cofounder Alexis Ohanian used to populate the site in its earliest days. “You would go to Reddit in the early days, the first couple of months and there’d be tons of … fake users,” Huffman says in a video for online educator Udacity. Through those fake accounts, Huffman and Ohanian submitted high-quality content—the type of articles they wanted read. Reddit bans "The Atlantic," "Businessweek," others in major anti-spam move. Reddit just dropped the banhammer.
As of today, more than a half-dozen prominent websites have been banned from the massively popular link-sharing site, including digital publishing heavyweights The Atlantic and PhysOrg. Redditors are collecting the blacklisted sites at a freshly minted subreddit, r/BannedDomains. The list so far includes at least five: Businessweek.com, Phys.org, ScienceDaily.com, TheAtlantic.com, and GlobalPost. Redditors are prevented from submitting links to any of the above sites. Instead, they’re greeted with the following message: “this domain has been banned for spamming and/or cheating.” The move comes exactly one week after the site announced a new site-wide ban feature intended to cut back on spam. How “The Atlantic” successfully spammed Reddit.
How Not To Sort By Average Rating. By Evan Miller February 6, 2009 (Changes) PROBLEM: You are a web programmer.
You have users. Your users rate stuff on your site. You want to put the highest-rated stuff at the top and lowest-rated at the bottom. WRONG SOLUTION #1: Score = (Positive ratings) - (Negative ratings) Why it is wrong: Suppose one item has 600 positive ratings and 400 negative ratings: 60% positive. Sites that make this mistake: Urban Dictionary WRONG SOLUTION #2: Score = Average rating = (Positive ratings) / (Total ratings) Not_available. Why Is Quora Mass Creating Twitter Accounts On Mechanical Turk? Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is, among other things, a great place to get cheap labor to perform simple tasks that help black hat SEO efforts and general social network spamming.
The problem is growing so large that it’s becoming a serious pollution issue, and we’ve begun real research to try to track the big guys who are behind it. And we’re using new search engine Blekko, which is transparent about page ranking, to understand how search engines deal with all this stuff. During our research we found something very peculiar – Quora is using Mechanical Turk to mass create Twitter accounts: “Given a name, username, password, and email address, create a new Twitter account,” says the posting.
You’ll be paid 15 cents, and as of today there were 1,483 opportunities still available. My job was to game Digg using infographics, voting networks, and bait-and-switch. It was the company's core business, and it was sleazy as hell. AMA. : IAmA. Reddit games the new Digg. Has 7 of its own posts on the front page. Ever since the launch of Version 4 of Digg, people have been up in arms about how the site has essentially turned into nothing more than a glorified RSS dump for sites.
In case you’ve missed the news, the biggest problem behind the new version is that it allows sites to push their RSS feeds directly into their timeline, which can cause the overall quality of front-page posts to diminish. MrBabyMan: Digg Users Revolt, Against the One Pure Man at the Top. Andrew Sorcini lives in Los Angeles, works as an animator for Disney and is the most powerful user that social news site Digg.com has ever seen.
Known at Digg and elsewhere as MrBabyMan, Sorcini has submitted a site-leading 2,400+ stories that have hit the site's coveted front page. Those front page submissions have delivered an estimated 50 million pageviews to the sites the submissions came from. A good number of those submissions have been RWW articles, and we appreciate that. For months, a small but outspoken number of Digg's millions of other users have complained about seeing as many as three or four MrBabyMan submissions on the front page at one time. As we write this he has two front page stories. Right-Wing Group Conspiring to Control Digg Uncovered. There's something rotten going on at massive social news site Digg.
A sprawling campaign of political conservatives working together on secret mailing lists to orchestrate systematic burying of news stories and other users believed to be politically liberal has been uncovered by an investigation published on today on Alternet. Report author Ole Ole Olson focused on a group called Digg Patriots, which he alleges used a now-deleted Yahoo Groups email list to distribute bury orders for more than 40,000 stories over the past 15 months. In addition to explicitly liberal political articles, "articles about education, homophobia, racism, science, the environment, economics, wealth disparity, world events, the media, green energy, and anything even slightly critical of the GOP/Tea Party/FoxNews/corporations are targets," Olson writes.
The Big Picture. The hypocrisy of digg and spam. More aggressive SMO marketers often talk about being careful not to get user accounts banned on digg.
But what about the domain name? Banning user accounts has to do with the actions of the user. That is, behaviors and actions the user can control. However, a domain name brings into other considerations. For example, whether or not influential members of the digg community like or don’t like a certain site or topic, regardless of what the mass of digg users respond to in the form of story submissions and votes. Sites can be banned from having their stories submitted to digg based on the activities of others having nothing to do with the site owner.
I recently learned from a top digg member that certain digg community members decided to start getting rid of SEO sites by emailing spam complaints to digg. “All the users decided to email digg on spam about the seo sites. This happened to Online Marketing Blog recently. The kicker is that we didn’t submit those stories. How to be a Dirty Digger.