That said, I do take issue with a couple of the statements made in the piece, although I have seen the very same odd voting patterns as the author, and by and large I agree that it is agenda-driven.

Although some of the users behind the accounts from which the odd voting patterns have originated have clearly identified themselves as Digg users, it is not fair to attribute the entire phenomena to Diggers that can’t stand the thought of people frequenting news-aggregation sites other than Digg. Mixx is a community that is open to everyone (including Diggers) so long as everyone follows the rules, and there is simply not enough evidence to support the ‘coordinated conspiracy’ theory.

Additionally, this type of behavior is common at all social media sites. It is even worse at third-party marketplaces and auction sites. If you wist to test this claim, set up a new account at Reddit, submit a random story and monitor how long it takes for the first negative vote to be recorded. 7 out of the 9 test-submissions I made at Reddit for the sake of this experiment were voted down to 0 within 5-10 minutes. In at least one case, a story I submitted that was quickly buried became popular several hours later when submitted by another user.

At least negative votes are transparent at Mixx. Unfortunately, the reporting of user TOS violations is still anonymous at most if not all social media communities and marketplace/auction sites. This feature is severely abused at sites where low-wage employees are placed in charge of evaluating accusations of spam, TOS and listing violations.

Some people will stoop to any depth if it means getting to take a cheap shot at someone they consider to be in competition with themselves. This can include voting down good content at Mixx, baseless spam accusations against competitors, multiple accounts for voting, comment intimidation (anonymously ripping a competitor’s article in the comment area in hopes of discouraging them from making future submissions and set a negative tone for the commenting) and probably other sinister tactics that I’ve yet to observe.

The type of people described above cannot be overlooked when investigating the increasing amount of spammy votes, submissions and comments at Mixx.

I’m no fan of Digg, but there is plenty of legitimate dirt to be had on Digg that doesn’t require speculative accusations that make the Mixx community look like a small crowd of internet vagrants and pissed off Digg-rejects.

Finally, I disagree with your assertion that users that don’t submit are contributing little or nothing to the site. A person who visits Mixx from time to time to check out the news headlines and occasionally vote for those they deem important is an important Mixx user who’s contributions should not be overlooked. Just by being there, these casual users who go to Mixx to find the news provide an audience and voting base that is of value to everyone on the site. More voting activity will make Mixx more appealing to publishers who in turn will (hopefully) make well-rounded contributions in addition to submitting their own articles.

I am glad people like yourself do the journalistic research to call things like this out.

Great post and great work….keep it up!

Pretentious voter downers suck butt.