I’m Gonna Feel Sicc — Is Digg Being Gammed By a New Star User?

It’s not often that I get entwined into Digg politics. During the September boycott I stayed quiet. Although I helped journalists get in touch with Diggers that wanted to talk, I kept to myself — as I tend  to do when it comes to Digg drama.

But right now I feel compelled to blog.

About two days ago I noticed a new Digger who was getting a lot of front page stories. My initial reaction. Good for him!

Sicc, with his light green play arrow, however, seemed to be everywhere I turned.

That’s fine Digidave — don’t think twice about it. I’ve seen plenty of people become obsessed with Digg. They’ll submit an unhealthy amount of stories until they clog my ‘friends submitted tool,’ and I can delete them and never worry about it again.

Then I came across this post, which broke down the numbers that Sicc has been churning out — and I realized that something fishy was going on.

Sicc joined Digg just over a month ago. In that month he has garnered:

An overall ranking of 57
Has Dugg 7,427    (NOTE: I’ve been on Digg almost a year and I have 8,041)
Submitted 933 stories

I’ve spoken with Jay Adelson before and one thing he stressed was that Digg is a self-policing community. It relies on individuals being taken to task. Assuming the information on Sicc has been overlooked, I’m going to take this post to put it out there in the open again to let the community come to their own judgments.

These numbers seem off to me. Just looking at his profile it appears that he submits stories in batches (that’s fine) separated by about 2 minutes per submission (hey, I’ll give it to him) every day (sure, why not) 8 times a day (right). In addition to the submissions — he Diggs roughly 165 stories a day, every day. When he is not submitting or Digging — I’m sure he is painstakingly pouring over RSS feeds to find just the right news stories for the Digg community that he loves so dearly.

Okay — enough of the sarcasm, let’s get to the juicy stuff.

Kudos again to Baron VC who did the leg-work on this investigation. I’m just summing up and letting you guys decide if it offends your Digg activities or not — I judge not.

Following Sicc’s Digg account you can get to his MySpace profile (barf). But we also find out where he works. Turns out Barry does SEO for companies such as JWP Incorporated and Deals.tc and he uses Digg’s re-blog function to do it.

From Baron VC:

"I am certain
that he is running some kind of script to automate the task of blogging
the stories that he Diggs or submits. So essentially Diggâ??s blog this
feature allows him to get a link to both Digg and unsuspecting
sites like Wisdump.

If we do a Google search on Barryâ??s full name, email, and one of his handles we find out that heâ??s active in all kinds of activities like operating redirection sites and buying a directory of content that heâ??s trying to get indexed into Google.

For some really seedy stuff just check out all the sites linking into JWP Incorporated.  Not exactly your typical furniture store."

That’s the beef right there. I’m not saying I’ve verified all this. But following the links — it all adds up. It  certainly does raise an eyebrow or two. I think it’ll raise the eyebrow of anyone who has been on Digg for some time and knows that Sicc’s numbers just aren’t realistic. I mean — Barry, when do you sleep? Better yet, when do you work? Or are you getting paid to Digg?

My goal here is not to be judge jury or executioner. Sicc deserves a chance to explain all this. And if it’s a good explanation, I’ll delete this post. I’m not a witch-hunter — and that I’ve stayed in the background during most Digg-drama I think testifies to that. But if Digg is a self-policing community — then when you see something fishy — you gotta point it out. That’s all I intend to do — point to something that I can’t wrap my brain around. Perhaps the community can.