A Digg community member has fired back at Digg after the aggregator admitted to creating fake Digg accounts to vote specific stories onto its homepage. The revelation was publicized by the Digg user on Monday.
"Nothing I wrote yesterday has been proved wrong," wrote Mohanraj Thirumalai, a programmer known as "Lt. General Panda" on Digg.
Here's what happened: on Monday, Thirumalai decided to look into Digg's API to access an algorithm Digg made public on October 15. The reason is that he had noticed the sources of front page stories were different, and decided to investigate the coding of stories between October 1-23.
Thirumalai discovered 159 fake accounts that were boosting the popularity of stories from a specific group of domains: Digg's publishing partners, led by newsfeed.time.com, dailymail.co.uk, boingboing.net, and techcrunch.com.
"One thing they do have in common though is that they are Digg publishing partners. Did you notice one notable absentee on the domain list? Hint… it starts with a "mash" and ends with "able"," he wrote.
On Monday evening Thirumalai e-mailed his findings to Digg, but posted them on his blog when he received no explanation after an hour. During his wait he observed that the fake account activity had ceased.
Yesterday Digg replied on its blog. Digg acknowledged creating the bogus accounts, but claimed that it was to test "vulnerabilities in how users can inappropriately Digg stories into the home page."
Digg Co-founder Kevin Rose also commented on the post. "We've never taken a single dime from a publisher for any activity on Digg (outside of standard ad units). We've used test accounts since day one and will continue to use them as we validate our various spam/promotion algorithms."
"I know you love a good conspiracy but it was honestly a developer testing a slew of different things. To think we would have to "game ourselves" is silly, we'd just write code to put a story on the homepage, we wouldn't need test accounts," Rose added.
But Thirumalai doesn't buy it. Today, the "passionate Digg user" fired back with even more questions: what was the criteria for choosing domains for testing? Why did the testing include submissions from the founder and his girlfriend? Would testing have happened if people were able to see who was digging? Digg has yet to respond.