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Recently, Digg decided to discontinue its Top Users feature because of circulating rumors that influential members of the community had been approached to vote for certain articles in return for monetary compensation. Digg CEO Jay Adelson, however, denied that vote buying tactics would have a significant impact upon a story’s popularity.

The past few months have been painfully slow for your blog; traffic is down and those AdSense revenues that had been so juicy in the past may not even pay the bills this month. You keep pumping out content, but the page views don’t seem to be getting any higher and the buzz surrounding your blog is dwindling to a faint whisper.

It’s time to start resorting to desperate tactics.

In searching for an answer, you come across User/Submitter, a service that is specifically designed to game the Digg service by artificially inflating the popularity of a given story by way of votes that have been contracted out for a set fee. So you pump out another blog entry, hire U/S to do the dirty work, and all of the sudden a new influx of visitors come your way as the artificial popularity of your site has managed to lure in legitimate traffic.

Do you think I’m inventing this scenario? Think again.

Wired columnist Annalee Newitz conducted a small experiment to see if she could successfully game Digg’s system. In her article, I Bought Votes on Digg, she outlines the step-by-step process she undertook to purposefully create the worst content possible, as well as the particulars behind contracting U/S to take that lackluster content and turn it into one of the most popular stories on Digg.

Not only was she able to make observations concerning the entire process, she was also able to surmise what other site might be making use of similar services:

Interestingly, many of my diggers had also dugg the same three stories very recently: a Photoshop tutorial, an advice column for people creating portfolios and a discount coupon for a $35 computer room temperature sensor. Harry Schechter, who posted the discount coupon, confirmed that he'd hired U/S. An employee of Black Star Rising, the blog that featured the advice column, initially said the company had "probably" hired U/S, but her supervisor John Chapnick later contacted me to deny it.

It looks as though Jason Calacanis was on to something when he started his campaign to out the “social news scammers” by offering compensation to anyone willing to snitch on firms who were offering money in exchange for votes.

Jason, looks like you owe Annalee Newitz $100 for ratting herself out.

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