I was tooling through Digg’s front page last night and came across one of those irresistible top ten titles: “10 Sites the Violate Digg’s TOS.” Oh fun! Click. And then shock: The site linked, RyanUnderdown.com, listed Mises.org as #2! Huh? It was like the Twilight Zone. As I looked through the rest of the list, it was clear what was going on here: the poster had a political axe to grind. He was annoyed at all the Ron Paul stories that were appearing on the front page of Digg, so he threw together his own page that had all the earmarks of a piece destined for the front page (top 10 lists are always good candidates).
It is a fair enough tactic, if a bit unseemly, but what about the substance of the charge that Mises.org is somehow gaming the system by coordinating organized diggs? In a word: false. I know of no organized effort at all. If there is a group out there doing this, they have not only excluded Mises.org editors from membership but not even let us know about its existence. Could one exist in private? I suppose so. Can’t rule it out. But that alone wouldn’t actually violate any rule.
In fact, we’ve been so scrupulous about this that last year, when a group spontaneously emerged to digg articles, we actually wrote to the founder to tell him to shut it down, and he complied, much to the fury of the group members. It must have seemed ungracious of us! And while there is nothing inherently wrong with a group of fans helping each other find and digg articles on a certain topic, it struck us at the time that it was all about perceptions. So the group had to go.
Since then, I’ve watched articles come and go and I remain utterly mystified why some articles take off and others do not. I can understand why a piece like “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution” do not achieve popular acclaim. Popularity isn’t the only standard, after all. If Mises.org was after hits only, we wouldn’t be doing what we are doing. There are more popular topics in this world besides marginal utility theory, international monetary policy, and the methodology of the social sciences (to choose three topics that consume a fantastic amount of hard drive space on the Mises.org server).
But other pieces that I think should be massively famous and read by all, such as this piece on the wacky Zimbabwe inflation, mysteriously die on the vine, so to speak. Still, it is a great piece and worth running even if only a few learn from it.
Reflecting on the various mysteries of what makes an article popular or not, I had in my mind the piece from yesterday called “The Market Function of Piracy.” Now this piece has great insight! The author points out that free samples are an excellent marketing strategy but an expensive one. So what we have with piracy is a form of marketing that is essentially free. What’s not to like? the author asked.
I figured that this article would take off like a rocket, since it contained all new insight, had the word piracy in it, and is tip-top in its analysis and reasoning. The whole day yesterday, I was proven wrong again. It just didn’t have legs. That makes it no less good! But still, one might think an article like this would achieve notoriety. But apparently not.
The irony of it all came home this morning, when I opened up the Digg front page and see this. It made it after all! How? Why? Who knows. But it is worthy of this level of attention? Most certainly. Did Mises.org somehow rig the system to get it up there? Not in any way. Looking into it further, I notice that the fame actually came about via a completely different path: through Slashdot.
Popularity isn’t the only standard of truth and beauty, and it may not be a standard at all. But one can still detect the existence of a volition-driven meritocracy, even in the wild and crazy world of the web.
(As a final note, let me point out that the Mises.org server is right now being hammered by both Slashdot and Digg simultaneously, and it is working flawlessly, without a single delay. So: let me say thank you to Bill Gates, Dot Net, and MSSQL2005. So I said the unspeakable: Digg me down!)
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I must admit that I am a little unclear about the whole Digg.com thing, I do use it however to “vote” for articles I find interesting or worthy of intellectual support.
I saw where Mises.org was listed as a “violator” of Digg Rules but I wrote it off to the whole anti-Ron Paul back lash going on at the moment.
And it’s pretty much the same issue coming up with objections to online polls. Ron Paul wins an online poll or a text message poll and the results are blamed on “spammers” or “cheaters” Now, it’s been some years since Online Polls allowed voting more than once, but I guess the safe guards can be circumvented. As far as the text message poll, not sure how that can get gamed. And, then there’s the presumption that the multi-million dollar campaigners aren’t/don’t/can’t do any of this type of stuff. Of course, those status quo campaigns have already, in essence, gamed the mainstream media that protects them.
As far as the intensity of Ron Paul online support, it’s more likely due to the highly disproportionate number of tech-centric people that have libertarian leanings.
The Digg Rules seem to be open to interpretation and somewhat absurd in it’s expectations. Just placing the “Digg this” link button along with an article could be construed by some as an “organized effort” to impact Diggs. Obviously, people do want to encourage a “Digg”.
I have always been able to tell when I’m arguing with a statist online because they almost invariably try to attack my arguments by attacking my position, or my experiences, or my personality, or references, or anything else other than the facts. IMHO, this is just the same thing. It is a lot easier for them to attack the source (Mises) then for them to think about things and risk changing their mind, or even worse, shunning their cozy state sponsored freebies.
OH, and one more thing. Why don’t you guys switch to LAMP (Linux/Apache/php/MySQL). It is a lot more free in the freedom / free market sense because the GPL doesn’t rely on false property rights concepts to prop it up. It’s surprising that Mises.org hasn’t picked up on that.
I don’t think the substance of the TOS objection has been met. RyanUnderground linked here:
http://blog.mises.org/archives/005285.asp
This is a clearly documented effort to violate Digg’s TOS, posted on mises.org’s blog. I think that it was done in ignorance of the Terms of Service, and without malice. But there it is. I don’t know whether this effort is still active.
But I understand how outsiders might think that mises.org “insiders” (those who have blogging privileges) are working to pump up mises.org articles.
Perhaps a comment on that blog entry or some other communication would help.
Gil, point taken. There are many people who are authorized to blog here, and at this early stage, I didn’t really focus on what might be a problem with this idea. It struck me as quite innovative. But once it became clear that this led to group digging without thinking, I asked that the group be abolished on grounds that it was contrary to the way we do thing, and it was abolished. So this was nearly a year ago.
By the way, it is irrelevant as to whether this violates the TOS, which is designed to avoid commercial spamming and the like. The key point is that digging should be based on the merit of the article, not some sort of herd mentality.
Pfft… digg blows. Notice those are all anti-Ron Paul.
“herd mentality”… that’s all digg _is_, herd mentality. And the drivel that the herd over there selects is worse than even slashdot (slashdot at least had a few occasional gems, if you waded through the crap and knew not to read the comments).
If it’s possible to ‘game’ digg, then that’s simply a failure of their system (isn’t that the whole point of their system, to select what’s good, and deselect what’s bad)… and ‘rules/ToS’ is nothing more than a heavy handed attempt to cover up their own shortcomings (and what kind of emergent order/anarchistic system is that, that requires ‘rules/ToS’… Pfft… again). Would you believe that I only ‘discovered’ digg through mises.org (checked it out once or twice and never again)… and then later again because of Ron Paul (checked it out again, in a little more detail, and left with my current distaste for it).
As for LAMP (someone above asked)… as far as I can tell, their guy ‘diggs’ windows stuff, and so they’re using windows stuff.
btw, in some ancient thread thread about MySQL/Postgres vs. MSSQL for mises.org, there was talk of ‘simultaneous connections’ being a key issue (in defending MSSQL)… are these cpu/ram bound connections? or network bound connections? Because if they’re network bound (i.e. resource intensive database connection is being kept open because slow remote client link can’t consume the web page fast enough)… then something like Squid in http acceleration mode (like reverse proxy, but with only one real server, and no need for disk caching) will clear that up nicely (it’s quite shocking if you’ve ever seen it solve a problem like that for you… to the point that you conclude that the default way web servers handle dynamic content is horribly flawed)… (but then again, maybe IIS is god and has such a thing built in).
I have always refused to visit Digg, even once, even when mises.org articles get the “Digg” treatment.
Pat T. beat me to it:
“herd mentality”… that’s all digg _is_, herd mentality
If you want articles that succeed on merit, just go to a website that you know has discriminating editors. Like this one.
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