Let’s recap the events, Wired recently published an article on how they bought votes on dig to be featured on Digg’s homepage, reporting that it was simple to manipulate or in their words “hacking the crowd” by using User/Submitter services to do the dirty work for them. Now, while everyone was gasping at Wired’s article about Digg, Techcrunch jumps in (to obviously sweep up some of the traffic and defend their friends at Digg) on this whole ordeal by stating that Wired’s story was prearranged to attack Digg, solely due to the fact that Wired owns Digg competitor Reddit, and goes on to say that Digg should sue Wired. Wow.

Wired attacks Digg, Techcrunch backlashes and attacks Wired, and everyone is in shock as they read everything. But let’s be a bit more sensible and realistic about the whole thing, and really understand everything through an unbiased perspective.

Digg is popular, has a great user interface, and among all it has come a long way in a short time. Obviously, like any succesful business, they will have to deal with spammers, hackers, tricksters, and whatever else comes their way. Wired owns Digg competitor Reddit, and sure, they may want to use smart media tactics (just like every other business in the industry does) to boost themselves, even if it means hurting another company in the process, so what? Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington has several ventures that he has reported on using Techcrunch, even though he says it was published by someone else other than him. He owns Techcrunch and would not publish something that would hurt his business venture – no smart business man would. So if you look at it, Michael Arrington is being hypocritical in his statement, as he has also used media he owns to boost his other business ventures such as Edgeio.

The point being that Wired didn’t lie, they might have had some ill intentions or maybe not, maybe the author of the story thought by doing some investigative reporting about this that they would get a raise or a promotion – who knows? Also, who is so blind enough to think that any system is full-proof? I’ve always had the understanding that if you allied with others on Digg (or any other system for that matter) that it would be possible to push your story up to the top, it’s called having friends. You don’t do it due to ethics, but it’s certainly tempting. Someone was bound to come along and create a service like User/Submitter that lets you pay for user votes on Digg.

I for one wasn’t surprised, I was actually interested. Hey, who doesn’t want to be #1 on Digg these days?