Digg and Reddit: Please Learn The Difference Between Original Content and Blogspam
By Daniel Miessler on December 27th, 2006: Tagged as Digg | Reddit | Social | Spam
Nothing is worse for systems like Digg and Reddit than repetitive, mediocre content. These networks are designed to magnify the efficiency of the Internet by taking excellent content — regardless of source — and promoting it through impartial democracy.
Ultimately, the goal is to minimize the time it takes someone to get up to speed on the most original/interesting content within a given area of focus, be it technology, politics, or whatever. When done correctly, the concept is quite beautiful.
Spamming vs. Contributing
The system breaks down horribly, however, when these communities fail to understand the difference between submitting original content and blogspamming. Many are confused about what blogspamming actually is: it’s not posting a link to something on your own blog or website (if it’s decent and original, that’s called “contributing”). Blogspamming is actually very specific (I had the Digg staff spell it out for me) — here are the requirements:
- Find interesting content somewhere on the Internet
- Post that content on your own website
- Post the link to your website rather than the original source
The Idea Bazaar
When it comes to sharing ideas, the Internet should be viewed much like a traditional, open marketplace — where people bring the artwork, pottery, clothing, woodwork, etc. for public review. It’s like open-mic night in front of billions of people.
Hello, everyone. Here’s a short story I just finished. I hope you like it…
This is what the Internet is about, and I think Digg, Reddit, and their successors should be more open to this philosophy. We shouldn’t penalize people for offering their own original content to the world just because they submitted it themselves. It’s far more genuine to do that, after all, than to artificially manufacture a third-party submission (which so many people do).
Remember that writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait for it to be found. Artisans have shows and invite lots of people. Academics submit to their respective journals. In short, submitting original content for peer review is an absolute must in any system that values intellectual progress.
Communities that rely on a constant flow of quality content need to adopt a mantra of judging offerings based on only two things: originality and merit. Any would-be resource that fails to grasp this concept (or later forgets it) is doing its users a disservice by discouraging would-be contributors from participating.:
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Before anyone shows up, I do realize that most peoples’ idea of “original content” meets a very low standard. I agree that we don’t need Digg and Reddit flooded with, “Wow, I really like dogs!” — or any number of other random, mundane thoughts.
I also agree that any of those submissions should be modded down accordingly. The key issue at hand is that they should be modded down for their content — not simply because they submitted the item themselves.
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 12/27/2006 @ 11:36 am
an example of this happening on digg recently: http://digg.com/space/Awsomespacewallpapers_set
Comment by spot — 12/27/2006 @ 12:48 pm
Funny that this article complains about repetitive, mediocre content when your article is exactly that, repetitive, mediocre content. You say a lot without really saying anything other than you dislike blogspam and this topic has been posted 1000 times already daily by a bunch of people just like you who never have anything interesting to say except complain about everyone else!
Why not try writing an article that actually has something insightful to say about something original instead of this overdone whiny dribble. Most sites that are spam already usually get modded down and never see the light of day anyway.
Comment by overlord — 12/27/2006 @ 1:15 pm
Contributing vs. Spamming - Problem of BlogSpamming on Indianpad…
Contributing vs. Spamming - Problem of BlogSpamming on Indianpad posted at IndianPad.com…
Trackback by IndianPad — 12/27/2006 @ 1:42 pm
The fact that this story moved up the Reddit rank shows that other agree with this point.
And the real point isn’t “don’t write dull blogs” it’s to not vote up stories that are not pointing to the “original content”. He’s not really saying, “only write original content”.
Had he put a viral video embedded in this blog post and dugg the story, and tried to make it to the homepage of digg and reddit so people would click his Adsense ads instead of YouTube’s, THEN this blog would have met the criteria stated.
Comment by Ben Mc — 12/27/2006 @ 1:48 pm
You’re wasting your time writing about this. Digg and Reddit are moving closer and closer to mainstream mediocrity every day, and as their user bases increase, so too does the basic plebian satisfaction with what they offer. The front page of Reddit is drastically different to what it was a year ago, and any attempt to open a discussion on the subject is met with the usual tyranny of the majority - “If it makes the front page, then more people liked it than … blah, blah, blah…“
The reality is, most of the new crop of Redditers and Diggers are happy to read tripe and stare in wonder at yet another snowflake, without caring where the content is hosted, just like a huge proportion of TV viewers are content to watch reality TV show after reality TV show without complaining.
It’s time for those looking for the real deal to move back to the fringes in search of another home, and surrender the Reddit and Digg battlefields to the masses.
Comment by Bill — 12/27/2006 @ 2:11 pm
A quick follow up.
I just noticed that the above commentator ‘Overlord’, who took the time to complain about YOUR repetitive, mediocre content, also took the time to copy and paste his own comment into Reddit. Nicely done!
Comment by Bill — 12/27/2006 @ 2:22 pm
Bill, that’s funny… LOL
BenMC, where shall we go? You want to make something? Let’s do it.
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 12/27/2006 @ 2:54 pm
Nice blogspam, pal!
Comment by Joe Mussorgsky — 12/27/2006 @ 3:01 pm
This was just fantastic. We have the same problem in the Iranian digg, Balatarin (www.Balatarin.com).
Comment by Arash — 12/27/2006 @ 3:31 pm
Don’t go too far, check out clipmarks.com
Comment by curious2 — 12/27/2006 @ 5:06 pm
A great example of this kind of shit was an “article” that made Reddit’s front page the other day. It was nothing but content yanked from a post on some forum. What made it noteworthy to me was that the site that snarfed the content and made it to reddit’s front page was a FUCKING LOLITA-COMPLEX WEBSITE! Yeah, that’s right. I thought about submitting a link to the original forum post, but the damn loli site already had several hundred points, so it was a bit late for that.
Comment by Withheld — 12/27/2006 @ 5:52 pm
Uh, you do realize that it’s all a huge sham, right? That Digg, Reddit, Netscape, etc. are spam-mills all bought out? If there’s money to be made on theft, it will be stolen. Check Copyscape; see if this post doesn’t pop up somewhere else in a few weeks. I wouldn’t even see it as ironic anymore.
And be sure to drop by an online freelancer site and check the bids for spamming jobs - yes, for a few hundred dollars, you too can hire your own crafty online thief, who will get your site to the top of every social site on the web - when stealing, simply make sure the content is older than 20 years and you’re guaranteed to not be caught, because people’s memories aren’t supposed to go back that far. You can also hire your chorus of commenters to flame anybody who protests.
This ripping sites off is small potatos. Check http://www.comedycorner.org/15.html, with 20 pieces ripped directly out of the “Sniglets” book series popular in the 1980’s, without a single nod to Rich Hall, and with some other slimeball’s name on it. This just got linked http://humor.netscape.com/story/2006/12/23/20-words-that-should-exist from Netscape this week, with 13 comments all pretending that it was written this week by the genious who runs the site. I’d sooner believe in the Tooth Fairy than tell me that not a single person on Netscape knows about Rich Hall and Sniglets. BECAUSE THEY KNOW; BECAUSE THEY”R POCKETING THE MONEY FROM THE ADS. There is no such thing as a person who submits blog spam and does not know the difference.
Meanwhile, the RIAA sues you if you hum one of their songs in your sleep…
I’ve been cooking an essay on simply persuading people not to link to the SAME TEN pieces of blogspam every single week, but it’s still percolating… good luck with your site!
Comment by Penguin Pete — 12/27/2006 @ 6:41 pm
Complaining about the ignorance of the digg/reddit masses is like holding back a tsunami. Social news sites grow daily and become more populist accordingly. By itself that will have a significant effect on quality, but the systems are also incredibly easy to manipulate with sock puppet accounts.
Sites like digg and reddit have value as throw-away entertainment, but they are no substitute for serious journalism or small community blogs and sites.
Comment by Gabe — 12/27/2006 @ 7:03 pm
What the hell is “impartial democracy”? Since when was democracy impartial? I always thought that when you vote for something, you’re showing what you’re partial to. Oh brother, what a load of bollocks.
Comment by smokinsteve — 12/27/2006 @ 7:22 pm
An “impartial democracy” would be one where (hypothetically) — a bunch of people got together and decided to sway a vote one way or another in order to further their own agenda. Luckily for us no such system exists on Digg or Reddit. ;)
But perhaps you’re right about the word impartial; I should have used “untainted” or something to that effect. You should go hang out at Slashdot, by the way — they’re short a few negative people.
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 12/27/2006 @ 7:27 pm
True, true, I completely agree with you… but the issue is that Digg is policed by users, who tend to a bit overzealous when hitting the bury button… getting a mass of people to change won’t be easy if at all possible
Comment by Friedbeef — 12/27/2006 @ 9:01 pm
I put a link to this on my blog and posted it to Reddit & Digg.
Comment by Behemothaur — 12/28/2006 @ 12:17 am
LOL
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 12/28/2006 @ 12:33 am
Full of crap. Atleast write something relevant. F**K you.
Comment by Fcuk You — 12/28/2006 @ 1:14 am
Excellent, thanks for contributing.
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 12/28/2006 @ 1:16 am
Dan, I’ve been a fan of this site ever since i discoverd your primers on the tools i use the most. Thank you for the priceless tips and writeups.
Secondly, I agree that the charm of sites like digg/reddit is going down by the day. I go to these sites to get the ‘best of the web’ … now if you create something that qualifies in that category but it doesn’t get discovered, then the whole community missing out. I strongly agree that people should be allowed to submit their content (truly original ofcourse) and not be flamed or frowned upon. I hope we fix this so that the people with original stuff can be comfortable sharing their content; i think this will encourage a lot of digg/reddit readers to come up with ‘original stuff’ of their own and contribute in this wonderful web community. Bill, i agree with “The reality is, most of the new crop of Redditers and Diggers are happy to read tripe and stare in wonder at yet another snowflake, without caring where the content is hosted”. However, it only takes one idiot to ruin a thread and then, all we see is people flaming each other rather than discussing the actual content. Hence, we do need a place where promoting personal content is welcomed.
Comment by Jibran Ilyas — 12/28/2006 @ 11:33 am
So, basically you want to say that we can blog about something that has been previously blogged, but can’t submit that blog post of mine to social bookmarking site because it wasn’t original enough?
Then, how come that special youtube video is being branded as original? What if someone sucked the video off from google-vid or some other site that previously hosted it, uploaded it to youtube and included a subliminal message that prompts the viewer to visit a specific site/page once the video finishes! Isn’t that kind of a spam too?
Blatantly…I don’t think blogspam can be granted such a ubiquitous status
Comment by Naser — 12/28/2006 @ 11:48 am
I love the point that writers submit their work to publishers, they don’t wait for it to be magically discovered.
That’s one of those lightbulb moments for me.
I must admit I feel guilty even pointing out to my own friends, “Oh I blogged something about our mutual interest X, that I think you’d really like.”
I guess for every spammer, there’s plenty of us that feel enough self-doubt that we shrink back too far from any kind of promotion of ourselves or our work.
As for Digg/Reddit, well if your tastes differ from the tastes of the majority, then voting will never identify what you’d most like to have highlighted to you.
What we need is somehow just the votes of people that share our tastes and interests. And in a way, that’s what a blogroll is, isn’t it?
I also find Delicious is useful. The stuff that is bookmarked by people who marked the same pages I did is usually a great source of really interesting material.
Maybe someone can figure out a way to combine our blogrolls and our Delicious tagging patterns to find people that like what we like, and then flag what they rate highly to us.
Heck, that’s a great idea for a Web 2.0 business.
I almost want to not tell you, and instead go do it myself.
Comment by Torchwolf — 12/28/2006 @ 1:24 pm
I read this article and am curious as to what the readers of digg / reddit think about how these sites are being use for true content or blogspam.
http://www.pollburner.com/takePoll.php?id=6a81218e8501
Comment by Nate — 12/28/2006 @ 1:49 pm
Well, okay, Dave, good stuff but could you give specific examples of blogspamming.
Do sites like Infowars and PrisonPlanet meet the criteria you’ve spoken of in your opinion and is that consistant with actual Digg action / policy from?
Thanks for your time.
Comment by Deference — 12/28/2006 @ 3:51 pm
Torchwolf, check out http://www.stumbleupon.com/. I use the firefox extension.
Comment by Mike — 12/29/2006 @ 12:26 pm
There is a general flaw in this argument. While I do agree that originality and creativity should be extolled… there is still a value created by distribution. Which is essentially what bloggers do.
Besides creating content - there are those out there that work to distribute that content. And this is a service almost as important as the creation itself.
Hence the definition of SPAM being used in your article is incorrect (although I am aware that the vast majority agree with it). Spam is submitted with complete disregard for the potential of the market or group to care about the message. It should not be defined by the fact that the contributor may get some financial gain from the submission.
Another reason why your definition is wrong can be seen when you consider the following: - someone finds some content that is awesome - that no one has found before. By the grace of the creator, he puts it on his site - and then drives traffic to it by submitting to digg. Because it is such great content it makes it to the front page. Everyone who sees it is greatful that they did. This can hardly be called an act of spamming - because a chief characteristic of spam is that it is content that is NOT wanted by the vast majority of recipients.
If all the crap we received in our mailboxes was stuff we liked - then it would never have been called spam - or ‘junk mail’ - using the old reference.
This general movement against bloggers who distribute quality content - is actually HURTING the naturally symbiotic nature of the web - not helping.
Comment by Dan — 1/22/2007 @ 6:54 am
I really dont agree with the evaluation here. The problem is that your blog or a persons blog may never get seen, hence your contribution to greater mankind is lost in the shuffle. So places like digg and others have an important contribution to all of us when someone posts a link to this site or others that may have very important information on it that many of us don’t get time to see. For instance .. this blog has a very low PR and ranks highly for nothing. I actually found it listed on a blog that you have just said is spam like, in part anyway. They do have some good articles that they have put together themselves but also repost other important articles that really do need to find a bigger “Pool” then a lonely blog a nowhere@noplace.net.
Blog spam is just that.. people that use backtracks and link spamming under comments and false articles that is very nasty and serves no purpose, however on the other hand I can see exactly why there needs to be sharing or re-posting of articles to as many people as possible.
Comment by dingo — 6/2/2007 @ 12:24 pm
girlskissing!!! http://girlskissing.cjb.net/index.html girls kissing http://girlskissing.cjb.net/girls1.html girls gone wild
Comment by girlskissing — 6/15/2007 @ 6:50 am
Change your background color. How can anyone even read the comments? Or is that the intention?
Comment by Roger Ritthaler — 7/20/2007 @ 9:57 am
> “This is what the Internet is about” Well, it’s not. But still… here here! It jolly well should be. There are two many crappy “Steal some ‘cool’ pictures and put in a load of ads” blogs getting bumped up reddit’s front page.
Comment by devolute — 7/20/2007 @ 3:33 pm
[...] I wrote recently about learning to differentiate between blogspam and self-submitted content on meritocracy-based sites like Digg and Reddit. My goal was to try and reverse the negative programming we all have towards reading self-submitted material, but showing how it differs from spamming — which is taking someone else’s writing and submitting it as your own — usually for ad revenue. [...]
Pingback by Dear Readers, Please Submit Your Own Content | dmiessler.com — 7/31/2007 @ 12:55 am
And the girlskissing up there is the good old-fashioned blog spam.
There are some people in these networks who think that anything from a site built with WordPress is blogspam, since…it’s a blog…thus sullying the good name of Digg. I agree with the Digg definition of middle-manning (ironic, as Digg is the internet’s biggest middle-man). Linking to something without the relevant commentary besides “hey, look at this” is virtually worthless.
Comment by John Stansbury — 8/1/2007 @ 11:43 am
Couldn’t agree more. Self submit is right and necessary like you said, paraphrased, from the perspective of “here’s my stuff, take a gander, hope you like it”. I am trying to promote quality as well, something else you talk about. That said, take a look at my site, and I hope you like it!
Comment by Michael Erik of www.qualityblogger.com — 8/5/2007 @ 6:10 pm
Respect4
Comment by Mihal — 9/26/2007 @ 8:55 pm
[...] I wrote recently about learning to differentiate between blogspam and self-submitted content on meritocracy-based sites like Digg and Reddit. My goal was to try and reverse the negative programming we all have towards reading self-submitted material. I attempted to do this by showing how it differs from spamming — which is taking someone else’s writing and submitting it from your site to try and steal ad traffic. [...]
Pingback by Why People Should Submit Their Own Content to Social Sites — 12/27/2007 @ 3:45 pm
[...] Digg and Reddit – Please learn the difference between original content and blogspam http://dmiessler.com/blogarchive/digg-and-reddit-please-learn-the-difference-between-original-conten... [...]
Pingback by Social Blend 03 - Episode Pi: “Hello my future girlfriend…” — 1/17/2008 @ 1:01 am
[...] First things first: Digg explicitly authorizes the submission of blog posts. However, it’s important to note that even though submitting your own content is allowed, there is an unspoken taboo against it (on Digg); many Digg users have a knee-jerk reaction to this, calling it blogspam, when it’s actually not spam at all. This unfortunate and misguided line of thinking necessitates blog posts outlining why submitting your own content isn’t just allowed but should be encouraged. [...]
Pingback by Article Database » The Dangers of Digg Self-Submission (And How To Avoid Them) — 2/23/2008 @ 3:43 pm
[...] You aren’t taking anyone else’s content and trying to generate money with it, right? The point has been made before but it bears repeating: if you think someone submitting their own original content is blog-spam, [...]
Pingback by lbrandy.com » Blog Archive » Submit Yourself (to Social News Sites) — 9/8/2008 @ 12:47 pm