I guess I see it more as like those ‘get paid for your opinion with free products websites that I used to be a part of for free food and detergent, or like the old things you could download that paid you 10 cents per hour to have their ad bar obnoxiously block part of the bottom of your screen. I’m one of the few people who actually got checks, plural, from those guys, back in the olden days when nobody on the internet got paid for squat.

It’s not a game where there are rules already lay down. Just because you say something is wrong does not make it so.

If it works it works. My arguement for buying digg votes is that it does not work for the long term, so my advice is not to do it. But if you can get it to work go for it.

I get paid to write articles designed to get to the front page of digg and I get a lot of success. Those paid diggs with the medicore content are competing with my natural diggs for excellent content.

If this is your hobby and you do this for fun rather than money, I could see why you would get annoyed when people do not play by your rules. But breaking the rules of a website like digg is not a philosophical issue, it is an economic one.

Ethical issues do not apply. If I cheat when playing Chess, that’s unethical as the rules are agreed. Breaking the rules of digg, well, if you only play by the rules of multi million pound companies you will never get ahead.

Michael, I would have to agree. It really does go against what these sites are trying to promote and that is honesty. It is hard to trust people you don’t know when they are getting paid to say something whether it be positive or negative.

It’s kind of a double edged sword here – the thing that makes these networks so popular (voting) is what might bring them down. People will always try to cheat the system.