Digg responds to "test accounts" controversy
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Their's just making an excuse for a mistake. Their way of handling this is understandable, but probably not the best way to handle that situation.
More likely, they paid someone to do blackbox security testing on the live site. In that case, they would be pretty lucky if all someone could find, was a way to digg stories multiple times.
I think they did it to inflate the number of diggs on the front page stories so that it looked like more people were frequenting the site. That's the reason that there's no apparent bias in the selection of media outlets whose articles the accounts digged up.
That's absolutely not evidence that it is not testing.
It's a good point, but it is in no way inconsistent with their explanation. It makes perfect sense because it was (theoretically) supposed to be a small test that nobody noticed. Once somebody noticed it, of course they're going to stop it.
It's consistent with other theories being floated around, but it's important to note that it in no way contradicts their statement; exactly the opposite in fact.
If your theory is correct, why not just do it more directly? Why not do it in a less obvious way? Why upvote random spam sites as well (some of which were created at the same time as the accounts in question...almost as if someone were testing submitting spam on Digg...)
I don't doubt it's possible, but it seems to me people are letting their bias against Digg get the better of their reasoning ability.
~ Hanlon's Razor
1) Let's say their excuse is bogus. So what where they doing? Gaming the system like ltgenpanda claims?
There's a contradiction there though. On the one hand you're saying that you don't buy it's testing because they're too smart and too capable to test on production...
...and on the other hand you believe they have to resort to this roundabout way of gaming their own system because they are not capable and smart enough to just do it a more direct way.
2) Your assumption (that they could do it in a test environment) is not necessarily true. If their explanation is to be believed, the testing is not the same as say normal software testing. The intent is to be a realistic security test...more like a "pen test"...which are quite often done on production machines.
So far I haven't seen anything that contradicts their explanation, and indeed it fits the facts as we know them pretty well, while the "game theory" doesn't.
Maybe some more conclusive info will come out.
Sure they made some technical/communication/process mistakes, but they seem to have fixed most of the ones that are easily fixable.
I personally find Digg more useful these days because of the changes.
why they are getting grilled now? because once you become the bad guy, even the smallest stuff gets blown out of proportion...and let's be honest...this isn't exactly small
And considering digg is an open forum the loud people can be very loud.
I was at a Digg Live at FoWA in London a few years back and it couldn't have been more different than the conference experience. It was swarming with loud, misbehaving teenagers (and I mean 13- and 14-year-olds, not 17- and 19-year-olds).
No wonder their audience takes every chance to screw with them now (and that vocal portion of the audience convinces everyone else, looking in at it from the outside, that it's important and meaningful).
I know part of the charm of the Diggnation podcast is that it's kind of dumb, but you can only go so far!