Duncan Riley fesses up to having six DIGG accounts. I guess what he’s trying to imply is that DIGG’s claim to a one million-strong userbase may have been seriously inflated.

Well, I have about a dozen. But I really only use one. I just tried signing up for dozens of accounts for testing purposes. You know—the mass DIGGing and burying kind. It’s kind of difficult to maintain several separate accounts, because:

• You would need separate emails for each. And signing up for a free webmail account like Gmail account takes about five minutes.
• Sometimes DIGG bans you if several accounts all come in from the same IP address and/or with emails coming from the same domain.
• It gets increasingly frustrating to switch proxy servers each time you login or sign up using a different account.
• Anonymizing software (like TOR) can frustratingly slow down your Internet experience. And we all know how that affects the primary utility of the ‘net (“The Internet is for porn.”), especially when you’re accessing other media-rich applications while DIGGing.

Maintaining more than one DIGG account can be too much effort for lazy people (a.k.a. normal people). Only those with really nasty intentions will really pursue actively maintaining several accounts. That probably accounts for less than 0.5% of the total DIGG population. Multiply that with about 10 accounts for each of the 5,000 people who are into manipulating DIGG (that’s 0.5% of 1 million), then you got about 50,000 fake accounts. So that makes DIGG’s legitimate userbase about 950,000 strong. Still close to a million, I would say.

But that’s just the total registered accounts. What about those who are actively submitting stories and actively DIGGing (and with a legitimate DIGGing pattern)? I think using the total userbase may not exactly be the best metric for success here.

Of course these are just guesstimates. But hey, ain’t I great at math?

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