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Spamming Netscape

Spamming on Digg has been getting a lot of attention lately because of URLs getting banned and bad stories making the homepage, but no one is really talking about spam on Netscape. In the last month or two Netscape released a friends page similar to Digg's where you can see what all of your friends submitted which allows you to vote on those stories with ease. This clearly opens up the door for spammers.

Spammers now have an easy way to vote on all of their friends' submissions and this will result in many of their friends reciprocating the effect. By doing this spammers will be able to get stories on the homepage because votes from friends count as the same as votes from non-friends (based on my observations). Digg's algorithm on the other hand takes votes from friends into account so if you have 30 votes from friends it is not as effective as 30 votes from non-friends.

As these social sites increase in popularity, spam is going to be a major problem and I think they are going to have to build sophisticated algorithms to help stop it. Netscape does have anchors who serve as "editors" for the submissions. They have the power to remove stories so they can stop spam to a certain extent, but due to this feature, at least for the time being, more spam stories will get on Netscape. In the future they will probably modify their algorithm, but I suspect it won't be long until "spammers" catch on and start abusing the system.

Amrit Hallan, December 1, 2006

Spammers are depressed souls because even the neighborhood kid knows spamming is bad for business. Even if they generate loads of traffic, such link-popularity measures sooner or later become a burden, not an asset.

greg, December 2, 2006

shhhhhhhh