Help spread the word about transparency in social media.

Click the link on the blind digg percentage and see an analysis of that user's votes and decide for yourself.

If there has been a change in the blind digging rate of a user since the last time week took a sample, the change is shown in parenthesis next to it.

The blind diggers were created by man. They evolved. They look human. Some are programmed to think they are human. There are many copies. And they have a plan.

There has been quite a bit of controversy in the last few weeks about how quickly Top Diggers seem to rack up the Diggs. It started when a few people noticed that MrBabyMan Reads So Fast. When questioned in an interview, he responded that no, he does not use any scripts. He is able to Digg stories so quickly by opening every story in a tab, then cycling through the tabs and clicking the Digg button for each story. He freely admitted that he doesn't have time to Digg everything, but he trusts his friend network to submit good content and he Diggs to "Support His Friends."

This is what we call Blind Digging. They're not reading the stories, they're just voting stories up as part of a quid pro quo with their friend networks. Vote for my submissions, and I'll vote for yours. Find 300 people that will do that and you can get most anything to the front page.

Which got us to thinking. How many of the Top Diggers actually Digg Blindly? Is the way to get to the top of Digg to establish a network of friends that will blindly Digg your submissions?

To answer that question, we've set up a script that queries the Digg API to check the rate of blind digging of the Top 1000 Diggers according to SocialBlade, a great service that ranks Diggers according to the number of stories they've gotten to the front page.

We define a Blind Digg as a vote for a story that has occurred within 20 seconds or less than a vote for another story. We sample the Diggers last 1,000 votes and calculate what percentage of them took place within 20 seconds of another vote. Even a speed reader can't fully comprehend 3 stories per minute, so we think that's a fair measure of whether someone is actually reading the stories. Needless to say, we were shcoked at the level of blind digging going on at the top. Read through the data below and you'll see what we're talking about.

You can click on the name of the Digger and it will take you to their submission page and you can see their voting pattern for yourself. We also show the current count of their friends/fans/mutual friends and diggs. These are from the API so they'll lag a bit from what you see when you visit their profile.

We've calculated a Diggs Per Day and Diggs Per Day in the Last 30 days for each Digger. Diggs Per Day is just their total number of Diggs divided by the number of days they've had an account. Diggs Per Day in the Last 30 Days shows their rate over the last 30 days. You can see that a lot of people at the top seem to have increased their rate of Digging in the last month compared to the history of their account.

Friend Diggs is the percent of their Diggs that were for stories submitted by their friends. Mutual Diggs is the percent of their Diggs that were for stories by their mutual friends. High numbers here combined with a high blind digging rate would seem to indicate that they're voting cooperatively with their friends.

We'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide if anyone is manipulating the system. You can sort the results by clicking on a column header.

If you'd like to see which Diggers are abusive while you're Digging, just download this Greasemonkey Script. It shows the current rank and the percent of blind diggs for that user, if we've got data on them. If they're above 20%, we show the results in red. Feel free to bury submissions from abusive diggers, it can only help the community.