Digg: Is Kevin Rose on the level?

What does the future of Digg portend if even perhaps its most ardent supporter fesses up to "spamming" what Kevin Rose calls a “digital media democracy”? 

In congratulating Rose on its 1,000,000 touted registered Digger, Michael Web 2.0 Arrington takes a bit of the credit himself for helping Digg reach the milestone sooner, rather than later:

They’ve had a million accounts registered at the site (at least ten of which are mine).

Rose made the million registered user announcement at the Digg blog today, and skepticism abounds about the reliability of the figure.

SEO Black Hat: Everyone who uses Digg is spamming it by creating multiple “sock puppet” accounts. More than 10 are his (Arrington), and 10 belong to every other “white hat” who passively games Digg. How many serious spammers have more than 5 thousand accounts with bots creating real looking histories? it would be a hell of a lot more impressive if you told me you had 250,000 verified accounts - accounts that we knew tracked back to unique individuals. And no, verification emails to a freemail account don’t really count.

Mashable: It’s pretty irresponsible, however, to throw out stats like “1 million users”. What this means is “one million registered accounts”. Since Digg’s model of voting on stories positively begs for people to set up tens, if not hundreds of fake accounts, and some accounts are likely unused or abandoned, we can safely say than Digg isn’t really approaching seven figures. In fact, some users seem surprised that Digg “only” has 1 million users - if you read enough Digg stories, you’ll come away believing that Digg is at least as big as YouTube.

Arrington smiled in putting forth that he is the proud owner of multiple Digg accounts. Is Digg spamming really something to laugh about?

Arrington has publicly said Digg is the Web 2.0 company he would most like to work for. Would that be a good thing?

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