06.26.09

Microsoft is Policing Digg — Claim

Posted in GNU/Linux, Marketing, Microsoft at 6:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Evidence of a Microsoft “bury brigade”

DIGG, like Slashdot, lost its way a couple of years ago when companies saw the potential to market, police and guide the zeitgeist. We wrote about this a few times before [1, 2] and SJVN bases his latest article on personal experience which is bitter.

Digg, Dug, Buried: How Linux news disappears

[...]

But, that said, Digg admits that group of users-say Microsoft employees, partners, and supporters-can “abusively bury content.” I’d add, not just ‘can, but do.’

It is no secret that Microsoft gives gifts to users of social networks who promote Microsoft. We even have press releases to show that Microsoft is doing this, so it is not a speculation.

For whatever value it may have, appended below are some posts which may be related to this subject. SJVN has plenty of reasons to be suspicious and very much correct. Microsoft would go to great lengths to prevent him from writing. Remember what happened to Dan Geer [1, 2, 3]? █

Related:

“I’m a huge fan of guerrilla marketing.”

–Joe Wilcox, Microsoft Fan

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9 Comments

BroWren said,

June 26, 2009 at 9:23 am

Glad to see you had something up about this.

I’m wondering if there might be some way to prove it using Digg’s APIs – grab the ratings for all stories mentioning GNU/Linux and trend-graph the scores, maybe?

If the data’s available, it might also be interesting to see how many user accounts are common to the burials and if there’s some sort of logic to it, maybe some sort of threshold score at which they start attacking.

Roy Schestowitz Reply:
June 26th, 2009 at 9:32 am
What would you do with such data? Digg is unwilling to put an end to this and so is Slashdot. I think abandoning these sites is a better solution. I have over 3,000 ‘friends’ (mostly people whom I don’t know) in Digg, but I abandoned the site after posting over 13,000 comments there (I was the most prolific). There is mod-bombing and personal abuse from Microsoft spinners. See updates #2 and #4 here for example.

Yuhong Bao Reply:
June 26th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Indeed, I never have read Digg, reading Slashdot instead.

lalala Reply:
June 26th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
So everyone that buried your “stories” and comments are Microsoft spinners?

twitter Reply:
June 27th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Nice spin, lalala. When presented with evidence of a corporate effort to bury stories in community media, claim the presenter is paranoid and reframe their argument in a ridiculous way. The traditional names for these are smear and strawman. When M$ spinners dip to that kind of tactic, it is generally because they have nothing better.

lalala Reply:
June 27th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
twitter, read this comment slowly so maybe you’ll be able to comprehend it. I didn’t claim anything, I was asking a question. Did you not notice the question mark at the end of my comment? Besides, the question was for Roy, not you. Is Roy not able to answer questions directed towards him? Must his friends always answer for him? Is he too scared to answer me for some reason?

Also, the whole “This person doesn’t praise what Roy wrote so he or she must work for MS” thing is old, very old.
Yuhong Bao said,

June 26, 2009 at 12:43 pm

I never have read Digg, I read Slashdot instead. And ars technica also.
Sean Tilley said,

June 27, 2009 at 12:57 am

I’m mostly bothered by what makes the front page of Digg anymore. Celebrity news, low-brow humour, and Apple’s latest releases. It bothers me that user-submitted news has degraded to the point of being 90% spam. Part of the reason I cancelled my television subscription was to get away from that kind of thing!
FS Daily is fairly good in comparison.

While we’re on topic, though: a lot of social networking sites have equally disappointed me. Myspace, YouTube, and Twitter all now lean dangerously into an overly commercialist style where all celebrities and users alike do is spread advertising for products.

At the very least, there’s identi.ca, FS Daily, TuxMachines, and a few other places that I can get some solid community news from.
ace said,

July 6, 2009 at 6:06 am

Microsoft is just evil. People need to stop giving business to microsoft. Seriously.