Five ways to get a Digg/Reddit clone

Posted by multippt

If you love Digging (or redditing) to the point that you simply must have your own personalized “Digg” site, this article is here to help you do that. An added bonus - the full installation steps are in this article as well, so you don’t really need to read the instruction manual to get your Digg clone running.

#1 Pligg - Digg

Pligg is the closest you can ever get to Digg, except perhaps the interface (but you could always make one up right?). Currently the most popular CMS under social bookmarking, Pligg is used numerous entreprening site owners. Pligg also supports anonymous voting, perhaps one element that Digg cannot offer (yet).

The 10 minute install guide to Pligg (assuming you have your web host ready):
1) Download Pligg, install it to where you want it to be. Make these directories writable (CHMOD 777) otherwise some features might not be available: backup, cache, templates, templates_c, avartars
2) Go to the installation page (i.e. http:// yourpliggsite /install/) and follow the instructions on the installer
3) If you done it right, Pligg would be installed within 5 minutes. You can then log in using your own password.
4) Go to the administration panel (link is at the top panel) and browse/tinker with the options available.

While Pligg may be still in beta, it is fairly stable and usable. There might still be some glitches though, but chances are it is fixed with every update. Fortnately, Pligg is in active development and a final release may come out at any time.
Rating: 9/10
Sites using Pligg: Sphinn

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How to get your stolen domain back? Get it on the news

Posted by multippt

David Airey is a classic example of an unfortunate person who got hit by unscruptous hackers crackers hoping to profiteer from his hard-earned site. David blames his stolen domain on a GMail security flaw (now patched of course), but that’s only half the problem. It has shown that there is not enough done to curb domains being stolen.

Lost your domain? Go public

That’s what David did. He posted it on his alternate blog address. Fortunately his blog is popular enough that that story ended up on Digg and Sphinn. That’s not all folks. These articles were so popular that it ended up on numerous places (talk about link bait). Things have a way of coming around. Want to know where did his famous post ended up on?
-New York Times
-Digg
-Reddit
-Lifehacker
-StumbleUpon
-Tons of others

So, what happens to the domain? David gets back his rightfully owned domain. While Godaddy (where the domain was transfered to) was unwilling to return the domain at first, some loyal visitors had a talk with the founder and co., getting them into returning the domain. So, who wins? The people, and some pretty awesome linkbait.

You may be wondering what happens to that cracker. After having him “exposed” to the public about his deeds, he may not attempt to steal another domain anytime soon.

The added bonus

If you managed to pull all of that off, you get… thousands of links and visitors. Kind of a nice “compensation” for your time and worry of your precious domain being stolen ain’t it?

Why mass-burials ain’t against Digg’s TOS

Posted by multippt

While Digg’s terms of use/service certainly is lengthy and covers almost all aspects of digging, they didn’t mention much about “burying”. It’s against Digg’s TOS to band up together and Digg articles. It’s against the TOS to “spam” Digg. Burying? You can bury articles all you like without Digg saying anything, or for that matter band up to form a “brigade” to bury articles.

The Bury frenzy

What’s better than voting against articles? Burying them. A bury not only constitutes the same weight as 3-5 negative Diggs (technically it doesn’t do that, but it decreases the Digg velocity such that the effect is similar to several negative diggs), but it adds a probability of the article in question to never come to the front again. As an added “bonus”, Digg will prevent sites hit by a certain number of buries from being submitted.

While the original intent of burying is aimed for moderation, it seems that users have decided to make use of burying as an opportunity to eradicate those that they like. Fancy knowing why “make-money” articles never made it to the front page? Burying does that. Well, that’s despite Digg being a general site that isn’t constrained to any topic.

What are some things that people bury? There are mainly:
1. Multiple articles coming from the same place over a period of 10 days, particularly those that are not well-known
2. Articles submitted by the same person owning the sites involved
3. Articles talking about certain “taboo” subjects on Digg

Why isn’t Digg doing anything about burying 

The terms of use/service says nothing

Digg doesn’t say anything about bury manipulation. As burying articles is technically not manipulating the “Digg count” (i.e. Digg count remains largely the same) neither a “service” provided by Digg, Digg didn’t bother restricting burying because it is not really explicitly breaking the TOS.

Burying is a (perfect) moderation tool

Killing burying is a bad move, so that’s why Digg will never remove burying. In fact, implementing burying is one of the greatest moves Digg made: Most of the buried articles are actually really spam, and none of Digg’s spam made it to the front page for more than 10 minutes. Pretty neat filtering right?

In addition, having users to moderate content is much efficient than having small groups of staff filtering out content (like they do in SlashDot). Given that Digg receives billions of submissions, it’s impossible to moderate that much without the help of… the submitters themselves.

It’s not wrong to bury something you don’t like

Burying is often a tool used to bury spam and stuff like that. Because spam has such a wide meaning, different people perceive spam as different things. Some classify bulk messages as spam, while others classify things they don’t like as spam. Because there is no harm involved in marking anything as spam, users don’t mind burying stuff.

A bury brigade? What brigade?

While Digg does not take too kindly to Digg brigades, Digg doesn’t do much about the converse. Rather, because of the open nature of burying, Digg will not bother tracking user buries. Thus, mass-buryings against particular topics are “untraceable” for public eyes. Besides, no one has solid proof that bury brigades exist, because there is no means to view such information as of yet (Digg records it, but do they look at it?).

The implications

What are the symptoms of Digg not restricting burying? Users are now making use of Digg’s bury feature.  Sadly, burying is like giving a lot of moderation abilities to the ordinary person - so much so that even small groups of active users can choose to ban certain topics from appearing to the masses. Fancy an article that praises Microsoft to appear on the front page of Digg? Almost never.

Burying also bans information that is otherwise useful and insightful to most people. So, why do people bury stuff like that? Competition of course! Because burying is in many ways more powerful than digging itself, some users may actively submit rival articles only to get them buried afterwards. (Remember the side-effects of burying?)

Of course, mass burial is a widely unpopular action, and hence is highly discouraged. After all, no one wants their articles to be buried.

Digg goes political - one step further

Posted by multippt

Looks like Digg decided to add in more political fun. Yes, they have that political section that has gained considerable popularity, but now that they have this new feature - Digg the candidates (hmm, catchy), perhaps it takes politics online to a higher level? Perhaps you didn’t know those politicians have Digg accounts too.

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Unlocking Thresholds - Social Bookmarking

Posted by multippt

It is great to know how many votes/digg/whatever… you need in order to get your story upfront. After all, it is great for planning right?

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Migrating from Digg to Sphinn

Posted by multippt

Sphinn is a great social bookmarking site, similar to Digg. This is your one-off travel guide for migrating from Digg to Sphinn.

What is Sphinn?
If you know Digg, you can say Sphinn is Digg (their names are similar too). Like Digg, you vote for stories, which act as a sort of “online bookmark”, and submit them in the same way as Digg. Although Sphinn caters more for webmasters, any sort of topic works fine in Sphinn. This is unlike Digg, which although it is said that they won’t mind what topic is being talked about, the community generally distastes certain things (e.g. SEO). In Sphinn, getting to the top takes you about 20 Sphinns (a similar “currency” to Diggs), wherelse in Digg, it takes you about 60 Diggs. Of course, that may change soon in the future where Sphinn gets more members.

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Wall street journal supports Digg

Posted by multippt

Just recently, the wall street journal spawned new “Digg This” links. This means that all content is available on wall street journal for free. Sounds like a great move by Wall Street Jorunal. Of course, it is likely that it will support other stuff (in fact, they also used the Sphere API).

Digg has a short post on this.