Have you ever submitted a story to a social site like Digg and then messaged a few of your friends through AIM and told them to vote for it? There is nothing wrong with this but they probably know what you are up to, here’s why.
Usually when users vote on stories, they go to the homepage of a site such as digg.com, roam around, and then vote on stories they like. But when you spam your AIM buddy list and get people to click on a direct link to a Digg story URL it shows up in Digg’s logs that they came directly to that URL.
If I were running a social site like Digg the first thing I would think of when I see this is that someone is trying to game the system. How can 20 or so people (if not more) from different IPs throughout the world know the exact URL of a story that just got posted to Digg?
From what it seems like, Digg is not this sophisticated yet, but they probably will start flagging these types of diggs (votes) in the future. So before you spam your buddy list telling them to digg a specific story of yours think about it first, in the future this tactic might not have the same results as it does today.
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