Manipulation-possibilities at Social-Media-Portals

Johannes Beus
Yigg, Webnews and the other Digg-clones have a big problem: they do not have enough users. A first page placement in Yigg will seldom yield more than 300 clicks, at Webnews the traffic is nearly immeasurable. I assume that the operators are enviously looking to the USA and their big role model while hoping for the future. In a move to try and keep the last users from being scared away, Yigg and Webnews are now allowing ratings without the need of an account. Thereby opening the doors for manipulation attempts. As an example, this article was “yigged” through a few, randomly chosen proxies – the same should be possible without any problems at Webnews.

With this, the site operators are now prone to similar problems like PPC-programmoperators: click-fraud. This means that Yigg and Webnews will also have to consider they want to implement complex clickfrauddetection-algorithms or if they want to enforce logins like their US-role model – in which case the threshold for interferences in the ranking of these services would be raised at least a bit.

A nice anecdote in the end: the script at the Digg-clone Yigg, which really does not see itself as one, that accepts the votes for an article is called “diggit.php” ...

[Update] a Yigg-admin has deleted this article as well as my account and put this domain on their blacklist. Time will tell if security through obscurity works.
Johannes Beus - on Thu (03/08/2007) at 12:00 PM

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