Microsoft Digg clone MSN Reporter abused by users

A while ago Microsoft launched its very own 'Digg' service aka ' MSN Reporter'. The launch was obviously part of MSN's ongoing efforts to increase the amount of usergenerated content on its network. First launched in Belgium, Holland and Norway it got quite quickly a very supportive fanbase due to its easy access. However it also quickly became a place where cheating was the number 1 activity, especially on the Dutch version. Since Wednesday (April 5th) the service no longer allowed new postings and since tonight the service is completely down due to "an application error". Does this mean that MSN is working on improving the service and getting rid of the abuse? [Update: the sites are now back up except for the Dutch one but posting new articles is still impossible]

Available in beta since October 2006, MSN Reporter was launched only in three markets, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. MSN Reporter more or less works like Digg where news gets promoted to the frontpage via 'Diggs'. On MSN Reporter you have to "Kick" or "Dump" an article. But, unlike with Digg, you do not need to be registered with MSN Reporter to start voting, which immediately explains the success of the services. However, this easy-go approach has now also opened the way for abuse so we noticed. Especially the dutch branch of the MSN Reporter network seems to be heavily abused.

We made a test to see how the system was being cheated. We therefore added a post on the Dutch version of MSN Reporter pointing to a page we set up for the occasion with a newsbit that should attract quite some attention (to keep the test running, we will not disclose the exact url). In the first 10 minutes our post got 51 negative scores while there was no single visit counted towards the site. Strange, other sites, even the Belgian branch of the MSN Reporter network showed increased traffic even with a lot less votes, negative or positive. This rather unusual 'dumping' went hand in hand with a few postings getting increased 'kicks' as if the posters of this newsitem wanted their news to get higher ranked while 'dumping' other people's news at the same time.

We continued the test and found out that the first 60 votes had led to exactly 3 click-throughs... the first 48 votes on the Belgian MSN Reporter led to 1157 click-throughs which makes us believe that the Belgian version of the user generated MSN website is still more or less clean. But for how long?

Let it be clear, MSN Reporter delivers quality traffic and it is an initiative that is less restricted than Digg is which gives it a better chance to reach a broad public. It is however clear that the site (especially in The Netherlands) gets exploited by some not so honest users making abuse of the system. Let's see how MSN will solve this.

Here are the 4 different versions:

• MSN Reporter Norway
  
• MSN Reporter Netherlands
  
• MSN Reporter Belgium (Dutch)
  
• MSN Reporter Belgium (French)

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