Digg’s new expanded user profiles equals a whole new field of activity for the benighted individuals who spend their time filling our blog spam folders with links to performance enhancing drugs. OK, it’s a bit subtler than that but not by much. (This blog disagrees, by the way. Search Engine Journal is also largely positive.)
Since expanding my Digg profile, I’ve started to get friend requests from people like the alluringly named Mio Destino who:
likes what you are up to on Digg and wants to see what you think is interesting.
Mio claims to work for an underwear company and her profile page contains a predictable photo and a large amount of links to link farm sites themed around, you guessed it, lingerie.
This sort of thing never happens to me on del.icio.us or even Facebook! I’m beginning to wonder whether Digg have made a bit of a mistake, something that attacks the core purpose of their site without providing anything tremendously useful beyond a bit blatant “me too!” social network bandwagon jumping. Spam or gaming results on Digg has been a problem for some time (”can you stop submitting nearly every story we have?“) – it’s a whole cottage industry – and the new profiles are going to need a lot of policing if they’re not going to erode confidence in Digg any further.Kevin Rose claims in a comment on DesignVitality that the new design and community features will actually reduce the capacity of ‘power diggers’ to game the Digg system. Fair point – we’ll just have to see if the new model Digg has swapped top Diggers for Sploggers.
Filed under: digg, social bookmarking, spam | Tagged: digg, link farms, spam, splog
