Why don’t they get it? All of the major vote-rigging sites have sold off or are in the process of being sold. A new one pops up, destined to fail and be sold (Buyer beware, there is a reason why such a seemingly profitable venture always gets sold in a couple of months). SpikeTheVote – Sold. UserSubmitter – On The Auction Block. Why is it that all of the buy-a-vote sites fail? And why will they continue to fail? It is actually quite easy to catch and marginalize these sites.

Super-History Tracking If you havent seen this yet, then you need to. Using a simple CSS+Javascript hack, it is quite easy for a website to determine your browser history, or at least check to see if you have visited certain sites. Every time you load a page, your browser changes the way that links look if you have previously been to that page (you know, it turns the blue link purple). Using javascript, a web page can inject a large number of links and check to see if your browser changes the style. If it does, it knows you have been there. Thus, in a matter of a second or two, a site like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot or any of the other web 2.0 sites can not only check to see if you have visited a site like Subvert and Profit, it can even check to see if you have been to pages that you can only reach by logging in! Digg can know not only that you have been to the bad guys’ sites, but that you have logged in there as well. It. Is. That. Easy. Quick Example:

1. Visit Here… http://ha.ckers.org/weird/CSS-history-hack.html

2. Now, imagine, instead of just printing out the links you have visited, it prints out img src=’tracker.php?site=www.digg.com’. Now, his server can use that image call to record both your ip and that you have visited digg.com before.

Timing is Everything There is a natural pattern for how people vote. When a story goes up, it has 30 minutes to 1 hour to get most of it’s votes, before it gets shuffled off several pages deep and won’t be seen again for a long time. When stories stop meeting this pattern (ie: votes cast over several days with different referers and no early adoption) things start to become obvious. This kind of timing issue along can destroy the effectiveness of Digg-spamming networks where voting is based solely upon when the user decides to log in. Don’t you think it is pretty obvious that some guy logs in every day, votes on 5 new stories and 1 that was submitted 13 hours ago?

Spam Reporting Lowers Reputation of Network Users After a while of voting on crappy enough Paid-for-Digg stories, the simple reputation algorithms will devalue user votes so heavily that they will become utterly usesless. After a while, the ineffectiveness and expensiveness, plus the pattern of low-reputation, flagged users voting heavily on their stories, will make the program a waste of cash. Maybe that is why sites like SpikeTheVote and UserSubmitter decided to cash-out so early.

Where You Vote Matters Most voters/diggers/redditors vote on the story headline, not visiting the unique comments page on the site and voting for it that way. These services provide direct links to the comments pages. Voters aren’t perusing through the site, they didn’t perform a search and find a story, they went directly to the comments page and voted. This kind of pattern easily sets apart vote manipulation. Yet another easy reason why these Buy-A-Vote sites will and, do, fail.