Interview with a top Digg user; Fun search to to find the suspect (#)

Invesp Blog published an interview with a top Digg user (who wished to remain unnamed, as usual). The interview had some very interesting bits - hit the link to read it. I’ve not yet finished reading it, but it is one scary story. The digger claims that he charges around $1200 per story that he successfully leads to Digg front page. And apparently, people are willing to pay the high price.

In the interview, the Digg user revealed that he has a success ratio of 34% and that he has been active since early 2006. While the date or the ratio may not be so believable, it got me thinking - why don’t I do a bit of searching, and bring up a list of suspects, Valleywag-style? That is precisely what I have done here.

I used the search term "Popular Ratio"+34 site:digg.com/users/* - fairly self-explanatory. The query instructs Google to return results from only digg.com/users/, which is the URL for all Digg user profiles. Popular Ratio was included in quotes because users without any popular submission will not have that heading - thereby reducing our suspects to only those with popular submissions. Furthermore, each of these users are really power users with at least a hundred popular submissions.

1. Aidenag (33% popular, joined Digg in March 2006)
2. darkchild82 (35% popular, joined Digg in December 2005)
3. Jibberjabber (34% popular, joined Digg in August 2005)
4. Suxmonkey (34% popular, joined Digg in April 2007)
5. EmberJohn (34% popular, joined Digg in September 2007)

Of course, this was just a fun search, but you could refine the search term more and bring out better results. Do let us know in comments if you find suspicious possible users.

September 3rd, 2008