Del.icio.us Spam, Social Technology and Trust
Posted 9/04/2006 12:27:00 PM |
As I've written, I've lately been spending a lot of time exploring tag clouds. I thought it would be cool to see what other identity services the folks who had saved my:eego had bookmarked. I'm usually one of the first to find out about new identity services, so I wanted to know what these in-the-know folks knew that I didn't!
What I found amazed me. The first 16 folks who had bookmarked my:eego had virtually identical bookmark patterns. In addition to my:eego, these 16 accounts had bookmarked Oddress and the Mecenax Project, two upstart companies. Their accounts contained little else - few other bookmarks if any, no personal information. It was very clear that these 16 accounts were under the control of a single entity, who used them solely to spam links to del.icio.us/popular. Indeed, I had caught a link spammer in the wild.
Examples of link spam:
(Note, the 16 accounts can be seen by visiting the del.icio.us link for my:eego, but I will list them here: fasthand83, freaking_guit, the_bass, singyourway, nowayicant, sovool, holykitty, excel4all, crazy_1, thevoice82, allaroundyou, morefun78, sofarsogood52, outrageous_kid, paul_k, john1023. Screenshots available upon request.)
Of course, this isn't the first time that spam has come through del.icio.us/popular - I've seen links come through for mortgage lenders and pill sellers that were obviously spam. Del.icio.us is imperfect, as is any social technology - so no big deal. This is, however, the first time I've seen del.icio.us spammers put a company's brand in front of people. Looking at the bookmarks of the 16 accounts, obviously this isn't the first time it has happened - just the first time I've noticed.
It makes you wonder how much content you see coming through the Pop URL services that is actually spam. The clickthroughs you get from being on del.icio.us or digg are enormous - I can personally attest to this fact. A-lists and natural cartels I can deal with, but my faith in these services dips when I see egregious examples of abuse like this.
It is unfortunate that I had to find about my:eego this way. The identity space needs to work constantly to maintain the trust of its users. Those of us who work to help people protect and manage their identity must work very hard to stay on the up-and-up; trust is all we offer our consumers. As Jeff Jarvis points out, the "most valuable and necessary networks of the next economy will be built around trust."
This should, however, serve as a cautionary tale for all of us who manage brands. Yes, social technology can be gamed, but we believe in social technology because it follows an order that we're well accustomed to - a natural social order. Our actions online carry real consequence - a lesson we're learning over and over again. As Tara Hunt points out, honesty and trust are the currency of the new economy - "if you spend it, you can't replenish it - it's a valuable, non-renewable resource."
This morning, some of that currency was spent.
(In the interest of disclosure, please know that I have no way of knowing whether the companies on the spammer's accounts had anything to do with their brands being spammed to del.icio.us/popular. I make no claims of the sort - other than that spamming did clearly occur. I hope del.icio.us will deal with it appropriately.)
P.S. I've started a new tag called "identityspace" (del.icio.us/fstutzman/identityspace) that you can follow to keep up with the growing identity space if you wish.
Update - Del.icio.us has removed the spam accounts. Of note is the fact they removed the accounts within a few short hours, on Labor Day. That is dedication. Go del.icio.us!!
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4 Comments: (Post a Comment)
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At September 04, 2006 3:15 PM,
Ben Miller said...
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Because I am interested in the underlying issues I use aggregators of aggregators such as popurls and its derivatives. You can really see the gaming going on within individual sites (e.g. furl and its users' apparent obsession with acne medication) and across sites (say, digg and myweb.yahoo). Similarly, my trial of diigo was a drag because with its sns-features switched on, it merely allowed spammers to deface the frontpage of mixi (invitation-only Japan sns) whose strength is its inflexibility that prevents myspace-like visual abominations. Soon I will tire of watching the gaming and countermeasures and move back to a news source with an appointed gatekeeper. While I will not go so far as to rely solely on the NYT, something along the lines of spotback (or netscape?) may offer the combination of digg "democracy" and gatekeeper/arbiters that will work best for me.
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At September 04, 2006 3:29 PM,
jkd said...
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"This should, however, serve as a cautionary tale for all of us who manage brands. Yes, social technology can be gamed, but we believe in social technology because it follows an order that we're well accustomed to - a natural social order."
This really comes down to a much more fundamental - and much, much older - issue: democracy, or the appearance thereof.
I guess I'd say that I believe in social technology and the wisdom of networks because it's a hell of an ideal, not because I believe it works anywhere near perfectly, much in the same way that I'm a pretty huge fan of American democracy despite the fact that it was, y'know, a total fraud wherein ~75% of the voting-age population was systematically excluded from participation within our grandparents' lifetimes. Something good to shoot for. -
At September 04, 2006 3:38 PM,
Fred Stutzman said...
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Right - and in our social order there is lying, cheating, stealing, class issues - all things that transfer quite natuarally to our uses of social technology. The cautionary tale, I think, is to realize that the same punishments can be expected for violating these norms online. Lie to me online, I'm going to treat it the same way as if you lie offline. This is the fusing of the online and real identity - once coupled, it can't be decoupled.
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At September 04, 2006 9:31 PM,
Ben Miller said...
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jkd: I wonder, is a distinction between direct and indirect democracy useful here? I am inclined to believe we are and have been shooting for better indirect forms of representation in which a voter gets to have a say in choosing someone who will decide many things on the voter's behalf. In the context of information, elected gatekeepers who help manage the overload.
