Irony 2.0 applies to web 2.0 services that are doomed to fail once they become successful.
The more successful they become, the more attractive they are for spammers, marketers, or vandals to infiltrate them.
I always had the intuition that web 2.0 poster child Digg would be the first service that is going to be affected by this. And well, it seems like someone figured out a very clever way to game Digg’s system.

This is how SpikeTheVote works:

We collectively vote each other’s stories to the front page.
I act as the middle man, verifying votes and keeping everyone in line. If someone stops digging, they won’t earn enough points to get their own stories dugg.

Spike the Vote works on a point system. Each day I give you a mission with several stories to Digg. 20% of your mission involves digging stories submitted by users in this community, while 80% of of your mission is completely random. This is to eliminate footprints and keep things anonymous.

You earn 1 point for each story Dugg. Once you earn enough points, you can trade them in for Diggs on your own stories.

This is not going to be the only service to try something like this - the fact that SpikeTheVote made it on Techcrunch will encourage a lot of other people to come up with their own gaming system. These are going to be tough times for Digg, Reddit and similar services.

I don’t think this is evil. I neither think it’s particularly noble. At the end of the day Digg always worked best for users who collaborated in digging each other’s stories - in a strange way the users of SpikeTheVote will just enjoy a higher level of transparency.
But it’s clear that we are in need of alternative approaches that can’t be gamed so easily.
Using trusted social networks to help us manage the tons of available information seems to be the most natural way. But of course I’m biased

Other ideas, anyone?

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