Business

Slideshow: I Bought Votes on Digg

A sneaky web service offers to get you to the front page of the popular news aggregator for $1 per digg. We'll see about that. By Annalee Newitz.
Image may contain File and Webpage
Here is the account of one of the people who dugg my story early on. You can see that bigytalls1 also dugg a story about a Photoshop tutorial, a portfolio advice piece and a coupon for a $35 computer room temperature sensor. Most of the first 40 people to digg my story had also dugg these three stories. The person who placed the $35 sensor ad admits he hired User/Submitter, too.

See related story: I Bought Votes on Digg

After roughly four and a half hours, my story on Digg had gotten only one digg -- from my pseudonym, PseudoPotato.
After hiring User/Submitter to pay people to digg my story, it earned a "made popular" tag and had 120 diggs. By this time -- eight and a half hours after being made popular -- my story had also been buried.