So an external voting ring was created to submit and vote up articles that were created by digg's advertisers? Sorry, but I don't buy it.
If digg was behind this, then their actions are unethical. It essentially amounts to treating advertisements as content. It's saying "hey, the community likes this" when the truth is "someone paid us a boatload of money for this". Granted, the sanctity of digg's voting system had been violated long before this. But that still doesn't make it right.
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So an external voting ring was created to submit and vote up articles that were created by digg's advertisers? Sorry, but I don't buy it.
If digg was behind this, then their actions are unethical. It essentially amounts to treating advertisements as content. It's saying "hey, the community likes this" when the truth is "someone paid us a boatload of money for this". Granted, the sanctity of digg's voting system had been violated long before this. But that still doesn't make it right.
The voting ring is not only voting for Digg advertisers. There are a few blog-spam sites in there, and a few are CLEARLY spam (like buzzll.com).
It could be a voting ring that is also digging "top stories" to make their digg patterns appear more natural.
> So an external voting ring was created to submit and vote up articles that were created by digg's advertisers? Sorry, but I don't buy it.
I would say that's actually the most likely explanation. Plausible deniability and all that.