The web is still the wild west and because of the unregulated, anonymous, nature of the Inter

this article in Wired about one of the countless companies spriniging up to game social media sites like Digg. One of the biggest challenges Digg will face is becoming absolutely irrelevant as it’s pages are increasingly filled with artificially inflated articles

Digg has come up with some ways to combat abuse such as trying to ferret out patterns that signal abuse or setting up honeypots in order to figure out which articles are being manipulated and then banning those users who are digging that article. That’s all well and good and I’m sure there are some damn smart people at Digg working on the issue. The problem is that 1) the solutions are all reactive instead of proactive and 2) there are far more people (with a very large financial incentive) trying to figure out ways to manipulate the site, than there are people trying to prevent the abuse. So how do you combat the problem? This may come as a surprise, but I think the best defense would be to take into account the reputation of the user who diggs each story.

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