Jay Adelson on why there's no McCain Bury Brigade

The other day on the heels of our story on the mass burial of anti-McCain stories on Digg, I had a chance to speak with Digg CEO Jay Adelson about the phenomenon. 

Adelson suggested that the 'Bury Brigade' interpretation of the facts -- where some shady group of McCain crusaders has been systematically sniping all the McCain-critical Digg submissions -- was probably a little bit backward.

First of all, he said, "we checked to make sure there was nothing goofy going on. We checked the buries, and the burying algorithm was working as designed."

From di66.net.

Designed? As in, designed to enable Orwellian thought policing so McCain and his vast army of social media hatchet men can relentlessly prune Digg into a topiary of GOP agitprop? 

Quite the contrary. Adelson meant that Digg is designed to prevent secret manipulation -- as much for burying content as for promoting it. In other words, by that logic the McCain stories vanished because they shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Adelson explained: "If our algorithm determines — and I’m not pointing at any particular content right now — that maybe there’s some manipulation going on in the way the story is dugg up, then it takes less effort to get it buried." (emph. added)

And that's where the story inverts. If Adelson's Principle applies here, those buried stories were disappearing not because the group burying them was narrow and biased, but because the group digging them was.

Which means, by the Digg logic Adelson cites, the support base for those stories would be so flimsy and homogeneous, that a few well aimed buries could've been enough to knock them down. 

Quite a few commenters on the Digg entry of our story -- and on our post itself -- distilled the idea a step further:

"Bury brigade?" sniffed Digg commenter stephenpest. "More like spam filtering."

"It isn't a McCain bury brigade," agreed Web Scout commenter Chase Johnson, "so much as it is the majority of diggers getting sick of ThinkRegression and Fluffington Post exploiting the Digg system. In fact, we are doing exactly what Digg was designed to do ... filter out the crap."

From reading through our first story's comments, it's clear that more than a few people are fed up with what they see as a surfeit of anti-McCain content clogging up Digg. Many, like Johnson, point to the Huffington Post and ThinkProgress.org as leading sources.

"How many of the [buried] stories are huffingtonpost.com stories?" asked wilderworks, "because I'm an Obama supporter, but I'm so sick of seeing the same sights [sic] over-represented here, I pick one huffington post story from the digg front page, and then I bury all the rest."

Well wilderworks, fully 10 of the 28 buried stories I tabulated (35%) were from the Huffington Post (for whom, incidentally, I once worked), and two more were from thinkprogress.org.  In fact, according to Digg stat scraper di66.net, the Huffington Post was the single most popular source for all Digg stories over the last 30 days -- with 148 HuffPo submissions making the Digg homepage, and ThinkProgress was the fifth-largest source, with 76 popular stories. 

Moreover, the current #1 Digg user MakiMaki submitted more stories from ThinkProgress (60) than he did any from other source, and Huffington Post (38) was a close third. No. 8 user zaibatsu pushes plenty of HuffPo content, too.

Then here's what we know so far: There's a lot of anti-McCain content on Digg. Much of it comes from a handful of partisan sources. Some of this content is getting buried. If the comments are any indicator, some of the people burying are doing so because they disagree with the content, and others because they're annoyed at the quantity. Finally, if Adelson's Principle applies, these buriers are just helping Digg's algorithm do its job by pointing it to artificially inflated stories that need plucking. 

But let's take a reality-based pause. Digg keeps the key to this whole puzzle dangling around its neck: individual buries are invisible.

So we don't know how many buries it takes to bury a story for good (a few? a bunch? a whole bunch?), and we don't know which users have buried what. So even if the above explanation makes sense, it's damned to remain a mere hypothesis until someone conducts the right experiment. Or until Digg spills the beans -- which they're not doing yet.

"Burying is very vital," Adelson explained. "We want to protect it. Technically it’s a negative action and can be very provocative. We want to be careful in this open environment about that being shared, because it would definitely create some incredibly negative feelings from people who opposed a specific bury."

I for one was surprised to hear Digg is in the business of protecting people's feelings. What makes more sense, though, is that making bury data public would further compromise Digg's reputation as a platform for democratically elected information. It's no secret that there are active rings of high-level Digg users who promote one anothers' stories with little regard for the actual content. But arming these factions with data that might help them nuke opponents' stories would just make Digg more tribal.

For Digg, then, it's an uncomfortable balance. They've got to keep secrets to keep the system running fairly -- but those very secrets also hamstring them when it comes to proving that the system is running fairly. And if there's one thing that recent history teaches us, it's that democracy don't run on promises.

Speaking of democracy, by all means let me know if you think I'm off track, or if you can help digg up some more info.  Every shovel helps.

Comments

[Onera]

I think we have enough stories for Huff.. and think.. already on the front page. A few buries are not going to upset anybody.

[norm]

First rule of the Bury Brigade;
Bury any story on the Bury Brigade...

[notque]

MakiMaki has very good content. He is legitimately annoyed that people follow him around and insult him.

The system should be open so that we can see what happens and verify that the system is fair for everyone.

There is certainly as admitted ability to bury any story by an Admin.

This has been done to massively dugg stories. An Admin buries it, and it never sees the front page with thousands of diggs.

So it isn't even a question of it the game is rigged. It is. The question is, is what is the agenda. Is it a situation where we need to build a new open system?

And what if Digg is sold? Won't new interests be brought into the mix. New agendas.

The issue with the McCain bury brigade is pretty trivial compared to the serious and sober questions about what Democratic news means, and how we can secure it.

Radio is completely controlled by corporate interests. Cable Television is controlled by corporate interests. Corporations are attempting to control the internet.

This is a vital issue simply for the range of news available, and who controls it.

[erichansa]

dont forget infowars as one of those spaming sites

[dave]

i'm a regular digg reader, usually surfing there 3 or 4 times a day.
i'm anti-mccain.
i'm also sick of all the anti-mccain posts.

[Richard]

While i absolutely agree that there is too much HuffPo and ThinkPro content on digg, I think there is a bit more to it. I believe that the right wing is definitely making some effort to maniuplate digg - not necessarily through a "bury brigade", but through a series of 20 or 30 shill comments that seem to accompany almost every political story that hits the front page. Most of these have been dugg up a few times, and roughly 90% of them support a right wing point of view. The remaining 10% support a left wing point of view in a badly misspelt and easily shot down way.

I'm not saying that there is a "bury brigade"... or that there isn't. I'm saying there is a much more worrying trend that no-one seems to have noticed.

[milligence]

Lame. Just had to include infowars too there didn't you?

Infowars is the reason Schwartzenegger isn't president.

And by the way, so what if you're tired of seeing a story. It's information not ice cream. Stop being such spineless lemmings.

Lemming one: Another McCain story? Booooooring! MOAR BIRTNAY!
Lemming two: PRIAS HLITON!
Lemming three: Naked and petrifie [Sounds of strangulation for ancient trolling]
Lemming four: LISDNAY LHOAN!
Lemming five: LISDNAY LHOAN!
Lemming six: LISDNAY LHOAN!
Lemming seven: LISDNAY LHOAN!
Lemming eight: LISDNAY LHOAN!

Digg should just stack stories with similar profiles into automatically generated categories like grouping windows in your taskbar. That's traffic control and is perfectly reasonable.

But you people have not a single innovative bone in your body. Sad, really sad.

[Peter]

So they found BigFoot, Guess which candidate he is supporting. I always figured him for a libertarian?? http://www.myhauntsite.com

[Ryan]

This article forgets to mention that ThinkProgress has ban banned by digg in the past for spamming their stories.