Social Sites and the Traffic they Bring

May 14th, 2008 · No Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the various social bookmarking websites and how they can bring loads of traffic to sites in such a short time period. The meteoric rise in popularity of social websites such as StumbleUpon and Digg reminds me of the way that Google was when it first started out.

It was neat, it was cool, and everyone wanted to jump on board. But, as time went on, Google had to commercialize it and as traffic from Google started to equate directly to money, services sprung up that started to devalue the way Google’s search rankings (such as pagerank) functioned.

The Problem

In much the same way, I think a lot of the traffic is starting to be manipulated by various companies out there such as StumbleUdon where they take stumble accounts and use them to stumble URLs for people who provide the accounts. They do it randomly and vary the accounts to try to avoid detection (and banning) by StumbleUpon. For the stumbleupon system to work, the sites that you visit that are supposed to be relevant and interesting to you need to actually be that, instead of crappy sites that are just trying to game the system and make money.

So far i’d say about 15% of the sites I Stumble onto using my Firefox toolbar are there illegitimately. I always give them a thumbs down but they’re still gaining traffic numbers for useless content or content that isn’t even relevant to the categories i’m in.

There are other sites that try to automate Diggs, Propels and various other social bookmarks through similar methods. I’m not sure what the best way is to try to circumvent this, maybe by forcing you to do a human-test whenever you stumble a site, but that would really make it a real pain to actually rate sites as you are browsing.

Another way people are circumventing the system is through Stumble or Digg groups that function much like blogrolls. In a sort of “you scratch my back i’ll scratch yours” method, people stumble other’s posts in the group and expect stumbles in return. Usually the people involved stumble all of the posts the other people are making.

How to Fix It

It seems to me that social networking sites should be able to develop some algorithms to help weed out some of this behavior and detect it automatically. Looking at IP addresses, stumble histories, friends lists and who those friends are stumbling etc. should reveal a pretty clear picture of who is cheating the system. Even sites like StumbleUdon should be easily foiled by looking at the URLs that are being stumbled by those accounts. For example, if Account A stumbles Site A, and Account B stumbles Site A, and Account C stumbles Site A that is fine. However, when you notice later that Account A stumbles Site B and so do Accounts B and C it should become more clear what they are doing. If this happens a lot (lets say that you see that 90% of the same URLs are being stumbled by the same accounts even if over random time periods), ban those accounts.

I understand that the whole point of the system is to feed you content that others like you like (thus you will rate a lot of the same sites), but if you are giving identical ratings to identical urls with no actual review text and do this consistently, that just isn’t probable. This is especially true if you are rating tons of different categories and matching up with these other accounts.

For social bookmarking to actually be useful, the content has to be relevate. If people game the system and promote content that is not interesting, funny, witty, or whatever else it should be to qualify for promotion, than it defeats the whole point of the system and people will stop using it. The traffic from Diggs, Stumbles and other sites will diminish as the content they serve up becomes less relevant.

Other Lameness

Another thing that I find to be super lame is when you find content from other blogger’s sites and then repost it (verbatim or close to it) and then don’t even bother giving credit. I’m not talking about all of those spamming aggregator sites that steal our content and link back to us, i’m talking about the people who stumble things and then don’t bother to say they took it from some other site they stumbled into. Also taking another person’s blog post and then repasting it into your post while saying “Look at this cool post person x wrote on site y” is still really lame. If you are going to actually comment on it, take some time to take out sections and give your thoughts on it and be sure to link back to the original author so you can start a real discussion.