Who Keeps Social Media Honest? - Bart The Bear Says

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A couple of days ago I posted the title Social Media Corrupted where I pointed out a web based service that actually buys votes for Digg and Stumbleupon. I have since found out that this service has been in operation since April of 2007. They most recently added Stumbleupon as their second social media site. Their charge at this point is about $1.00 per vote.

Before moving forward with this post, I just wanted to inform you that "Social Media Corrupted" drew over 3,500 unique visits in a 24 hour period, 3,301 from Stumbleupon, at no cost to me. It takes me about 30 minutes to put an article together, post it to my blog, submit it to Stumbleupon, and send a notification to my 200 mutual friends. If they like my article, I just sit back and enjoy the traffic. I do not earn any money from my blog posts because, at this point in time, I am virtually an unknown (I think that is about to change) and have no advertising on it other than a Google search box.

Now, back to the topic at hand.

I have two concerns about a website that pays affiliates for social media votes:

1. Skewing page one content or, in the case of Stumbleupon, pages delivered. They are turning a social media site, which is supposed to be social and democratic in nature, into pages full of advertisements. Stumbleupon already allows some of this for the members who choose to be "sponsors". Every 5th or 6th Stumble is a sponsored stumble. They do have guidelines as to what kind of page you can display. The website that pays its members to vote has no guidelines, only customers.

2. Burying good content. Who is to say that this website can't send an email to it's armies instructing them bury a post? Imaging one of the top Diggers submitting a great post, getting enough votes, and expecting the post to make page one of Digg only to find it buried like a piece of garbage. Oh, but they would never do that, right?

I hope you think this is as bad an idea as I do. The members of the social media sites would do a great service, especially to themselves if they want to continue seeing their quality material continue to draw traffic and respect, to report these kinds of voters to the social media moderators.

Digg and Stumbleupon are doing their best to prevent these kinds of votes and voters, I am sure. We should be able to keep social media relatively honest between them and the social media membership if we keep a careful eye out for incursions.

This is our turf...