The "Dark Side" of the User Contributed Web

when did 2.0 get here?

which is the most extreme case to date of the abuse of sites such as digg, Newsvine, Netscape, etc.

I think PriceRitePhoto got worse treatment.

How did Gabcast know it was a malicious attack?

The Digg community is like that. Sometimes articles like that make it to the front page, sometimes they don't-I've noticed that some users could really care less about Kevin Rose. My advice: in the future let a few Digg users know about your posts and let them handle the submission, Digg is fickle.

"a direct, and malicious "agent-based" attack was launched on Kevin's interview for several hours ..."

The user-agent string for Firefox is something along the lines of:
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; es-ES; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6"

I've noticed that a story can receive up to 10,000 times (or even more...) the number of hits as diggs.
(30 diggs = 30,000 hits)

The average Digg user uses Firefox while the average Internet user uses Internet Explorer. So, if you received an abnormally large amount of traffic and the sys admins at your hosting company notice that the traffic has a non-representative user-agent string on most of the requests they might have (incorrectly) concluded that it was an attack.

I'm not sure what school of journalism you're from but I would assume they taught you to do some research on your subject prior to the interview. Yet, somehow you're not aware of the PriceRitePhoto incident?

1Tb of traffic is not a trivial amount of traffic, and definitely not something a couple of script kiddies running a bot are going to generate. A few thousand Digg users trying to download the Podcast as soon as it hits the front page could easily generate that much traffic. To Gabcast, it probably looked like an attack. This, the Digg/Fark/Slashdot effect, is something else you would have been aware of had you done some research prior to the interview.

Good rule of thumb--avoid anything associated with the made-up, meaningless phrase "Web 2.0."

This isn't a problem with Digg or the Web 2.0. It just sounds like people weren't that interested in the interview (though, personally, I thought it was an interesting read).

If that was the case (which seems likely since it ignored after 3 attempts) it should be no surprise that your article was not dugg to the frontpage and was subsequently buried after you submitted dupes.

I understand your frustration since I've submitted stories that I think are interesting only to have them largely ignored and not make it to the frontpage, but it's your mistake to assume what you think is interesting is necessarily interesting to the rest of the community.

Sorry to burst your bubble here, but this is not "big news."

Maybe it was just because you are a black man. You know how whitey likes to keep you people down.

Oh boy, put down the tinfoil hat.

Did you ever realize that probably close to 100% of the digg users are using Firefox? How many people on Digg do you think use Internet Explorer? Maybe 1%?

You're complaining because you were hit for 1TB of bandwidth from what I'm willing to bet was, at the time, the LATEST VERSION OF FIREFOX? Seriously?

Not a very bright one, are you?

Ronald, congratulations, you finally made Digg. Bonus points for the irony of a Newsvine post about Digg being submitted to Digg:

The Dark Side of the User Contributed Web (318 Diggs as of 5:28 pm EST)

As for the PriceRitePhoto incident, it went something like this:

A blogger ordered a camera from PriceRitePhoto and then is told there is a problem with his order. Turns out there really wasn't a problem, they just wanted to upsell him. He finally tells someone that he's going to write an article about his experience and someone from PriceRitePhoto tells him that they won't cancel the order, just not fill it, and that they will make sure he's "never able to place an order on the Internet again." The story goes to Digg and gets roughly 5000 Diggs, making it the most Dugg story at the time. The site gets hit with several Denial of Service Attacks (DOS attacks) and is ultimately de-listed from several web sites.

100% agree w/ yorker

I can assure you and your host that this was not a Malicious Attack against your site or server. A few months ago I submited a story that linked directly to my site (yes in the attempt to drive more traffic there) and while I only recieved 13 diggs (still to this day) the story recieved over 23,000 hits and has been propagated all over the internet.

I even recieved a phone call from my hosting provider trying to figure out what was going on and once I told them that all of the referral links were coming form Digg they understood.

As for promoting stories to the front page there are many things that factor in, time of day it was submitted and user karma. While there are somewhere around 500,000 registered diggers there are many more visiters to the site that just sift through the stories without digging a single one.

I think yorker is dead-on. I too would probably be interested, but if I wasn't, and if I was a script-kiddie, and if I thought you were digg-whoring (3 attempts, emails, different submitters, etc), then yeah, I could see how someone might want to blast your server to teach you a lesson.

Come on, you have got to take the foil hat off, there is no conspiracy, ok, now there may be one against you for acting this way. Learn the community, understand that self-promotion on a site like this is not exactly respected.

Well, he appears to have shut you up.

Why is the digg community turning into a bunch of slashdot trollworthy neanderthal grammar naziing idiots? Kevin and the team at Digg i fully believe make every effort to avoid it, though like any system with hundreds of thousands of users it's IMPOSSIBLE to track all the time.

That's why people get murdered in the real world.

This is just like politics, someone who isn't a 'top digger' tries to raise an issue and is slated on reception almost immediately. If I had my way I'd completely remove the ability to see the most popular digg users and be done with it.

You're kidding me, right? You're going to cry because a story you submitted 3 TIMES didn't make it to the front page? And then you asked people to"please please digg this" because it HAD to be a great story? And the "malicious agent" you speak of... Was it Agent J? or Agent K? If you don't give some proof, noone will believe you. Sounds like someone hosted and intergalactic kegger here. If it's good, it gets dugg. If not, don't cry.

Dude,
I dont think its any great mystery that your story didn't make it to the front page. Think about out: most Digg "stories" are just links to webpages containing news items or pictures or whatever. People can look at this linked page and quickly decide if they like the story or not, and then its easy to go back to digg.com and click "Digg it". 30 seconds from start to finish.

For them to digg your story, they have to go to you podcast page, wait for quite some time for the mp3 to download (not everybody has broadband), then find something to play the podcast on (if they dont want to sit at their computer or dont have speakers or whatever) then find the time to listen to it, and then after all that, actually REMEMBER to go back to digg.com and Digg It. The whole process is just too long for anybody to be bothered. Next time, post a transcript of the interview.
Cheers

Welcome to the new High School called "The Internet 2.0". It's a user driven internet steeped in mob mentality not seen since.. Well.. High school. If you aren't cool or not doing what is popular this very second, prepare to have the wrath of full on user driven websites attack you. It's the downside of user driven sites, the ability for the site to then devolve down to a form where it's full of nothing but the popular kids, each who greatly think alike and are gnashing at the teeth ready to attack anything that goes against them.

It's what will make this "Web 2.0 user driven" crap flounder while people learn to re-appreciate single sourced and driven websites where one person dictates whey they happen to enjoy and you only have to deal with that instead of a mob full of angry internet folks. You've probably seen it happen in forums in the past where eventually, the forums you used to enjoy became full of people that thought and replied the same way and gang attacked anyone who went against them despite the facts at hand being presented. Well, now there are entire sites being taken over by this same type of mentality and as the community grows and people learn to join the popular mindset instead of fighting them and they too join up with the mob mentaility, the problem grows even bigger thrusting the website deeper into a hole it may never be able to Digg itself out of.

Imagine if the masses of MySpace citizens got to make the rules for everyone on MySpace.. *shudder* Not that it already isn't an armpit, but it could get much worse and it probably will before people learn: What the masses want or think isn't always a "good" thing.

Not sure what was happening, but you have made it to digg, I got to this article from there. Hopefully the new steps being taken to reduce the problem you encountered will be effective.

OK, so people didn't want to read an n:th interview with Kevin, who is already featured waaaay too often on Digg, and you took this as sign of some kind of shadow conspiracy? Then you proceeded to pimp your dumb story AGAIN by emailing people in private and resubmitting with different URLs? People like you are cancers of the Digg community. If people don't want to read your crap, just leave it. Don't resubmit, don't change URLs, don't put "Amazing!!!" in the title.

This is just too @!$%#ing dumb for words. And besides, not having your story "dugg" is not the end of the world. Having a submission on the front page would give you 15 seconds (note: seconds, not minutes) of pointless pseudo-anonymous fame in a community of 13-year old ADHD brats. Really, who cares? Digg oftentimes features some interesting links, but people who think it is worth anything to be "known" there need to have their freaking heads examined.

Having calmed down a bit, I now regret the tone in my last post. I stand by it, but I wish I would have made my point in a less offensive manner.

No hard feelings?

PS. Didn't realize until now that it was an audio interview. That makes it even more obvious why it wasn't dugg and why there was the perception of a "malicious attack" (as opposed to a friendly attack? ;)).

PPS. Newsvine sucks! They don't state anywhere that you have to go through a long registration process in order to post a comment. You suddenly realize you're in the middle of one, which keeps getting worse. If I had known in advance I probably wouldn't even have bothered. Now I'm sufficiently annoyed to not come back here ever, except perhaps to rant about the infinite suckiness of said registration process.

Excellent writeup.

So what?

As you can see, my efforts -- all pure and well-intended -- to engage the community in supporting my interview with Kevin Rose ruffled a few feathers.

No. You were trying to game the system in your own way. Grabbing emails and trying to advertise. posting the story twice. Having a frined ost a reworked version etc. these are not "pure" efforts.

Quit whining

Sounds like you got a bit of a "slashdot effect" situation, and for the most people the people didn't care much about the interview. @!$%#ty I suppose, but not really a big plot against you or anything. On the other hand, if it was some sort of attack, it's more then likely the work of one or 2 idiots and some zombies, so it still wouldn't be a big deal as far as "the community" is concerned. Sometimes people are @!$%#s.

Either way it seems like you're blowing it WAY out of proportion, but then, it's just this type of drama that keeps me away from digg most of the time in the first place, so have at it I guess....