There’s an interesting article up on Wired about how an author created a sham blog with some banal content, then bought votes on User/Submitter and some fairly unremarkable posts with accompanying pictures dugg to the frontpage. There’s the usual commentary from Digg watchers, including an interesting charge by Mike Arrington that Wired is playing to some strong conflict of interests as Wired’s parent company own’s Digg’s competitor — which definitely has some merit. Mat Ingram seems to agree. They could have run the story with a disclaimer, but none is to be found anywhere.

But is Wired’s piece really news? I don’t think so.

After all, there are two things which we already know:
1. Services like User/Submitter exist — where you can pay people to vote for you
2. Diggers are lemmings — after a critical threshold, Diggers will vote for a story simply because its popular, and often times, without reading the story [although to be fair this exists in all public voting systems to a point]
What this means is that there is a means for lame and unworthy stories to get to the frontpage through artificial means. All Wired did was document it. But again, I ask — so what? Because, most importantly, once the story reached the frontpage, the story did not stay there — it got buried.

I would argue that it the act of buying votes isn’t news. The act of buying votes to elevate a story to the frontpage isn’t news either. But if we could find someone who would document a story that is clearly boring, lame, or otherwise, that was elevated to the frontpage through purchased votes and STAYED THERE, I think that would be news. After all, people who are interested in frontpaged material are REALLY intersted in the traffic and incoming links that come as a result of a frontpage Digg.

And as someone who has had a number of stories dugg only to be buried on their way to the frontpage, and even had a story ON the frontpage that was buried in 90 minutes, I can tell you that a popular, but buried story has about 1/10th the “worth” of a truly frontpaged story. I got a few hundred visitors and that was all.

In my opinion, the Wired piece is really less about gaming Digg, but more about Digg’s moderation schemes, which as I have rambled on endlessly, is dependent on its own community to police itself. Clearly it did the work well enough in this piece, but as with my earlier rantings it is overly “sensitive” as many stories are culled by roaming bands of bury brigades who have their own agenda; moreover, without enough moderators, they cannot exert ENOUGH control of frontpaged material fast enough. Stories which are clearly inappropropriate may end up frontpaged, and if only for 30 minutes, can get exposed to thousands and thousands of individuals — like the results of a phishing exploit on MySpace that revealed over a thousand usernames/pwds in December last year.