My First Death Threat from Digg Story

A lot have people are pissed off about the story I published yesterday about buying votes on Digg. Many members of the Digg community agreed with my assessment that "popular" stories on Digg do not always get that way because they are worthy or even enjoyed by the crowd. Others, however, have been incensed. First, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch called for Digg to sue Wired (he didn't explain what the grounds would be for the suit), and accused me of being a corporate shill for Digg competitor Reddit because Reddit is owned by Wired corporate overlords CondeNast.

Has nobody done their homework? Digg's communications director is Ryan Sommer, who used to work at Wired. Maybe the whole thing was a conspiracy on the part of Wired to promote Digg because we have so many connections with the company. Conspiracy jokes aside, I published a response to Arrington yesterday on my blog:

Already, critics are saying that *Wired *did this storybecause Wired News owner CondeNet also owns Reddit, a small companythat competes with Digg. This is absolutely not the case. I actuallydid extensive interviews with the founder of Reddit, and even spokebriefly to the one person who had ever successfully “gamed” Reddit.
Unfortunately, it didn’t make the final cut in the magazine story fortwo reasons: 1. The person who gamed Reddit was already a topcontributor even without gaming, so he was only gaming it for amusement(not a particularly interesting story); and 2. Reddit, as cool as itis, is nowhere near as popular as Digg and therefore there are fewincentives for people to game it. So if we’d included Reddit in myoriginal article, it might have made us look like we were promoting a *Wired *property and claiming it had the same influence as Digg, which it simply doesn’t.

So why did we target Digg and not Reddit in the Wired News piece?
Again, the answer is simple. Digg is so big that an entire industry hassprung up around gaming it, and therefore I could hire a company thatwould pay people to digg my story. There is no such comparable industryor company that will game Reddit. Again, I love Reddit and I think it’svery cool — but writing about it in this context would have been likecomparing apples and oranges.

Some people, however, went farther than Arrington in their response to my article. They didn't just want to sue Wired. They wanted to kill me. Read below the fold to learn more about my first death threat for criticizing Digg . . .

Suri Bala wrote from a gmail account to say:

Nice article. If you were that smart, why don't you create something
better than Digg and make it more popular than Digg ?

Also, you can pretend to be smart a few days and a few times with other
people. However, eventually people will soon find out how stupid you
really are and eventually they will 'BURY' you which is what happened
to you in Digg.

Did you buy you way to be come a Journalist ? I guess you must be ready
to get buried pretty soon, Hah ?

Nice. I guess I should get ready to "get buried." Because eventually people will figure out that I'm stupid and "BURY" me the way they did on Digg. Unfortunately for Suri, I'm so badass that I'll dig myself right out of my own coffin the way the Bride did in Kill Bill 2. And everybody knows not to mess with a chick who has just dug herself out of her own grave.