I don't think you can apply a pure Turing test (human or robot?) to Diggers, because Digg is a highly complex system and you can't know as much as you need to.

But I can look at a diggers profile and see that 24,000 posts in 90 days say.... Robot. And I can look at his "friend" network and see a lines of robots stretching out to the horizon.

And robots run by not very bright programmers.

Is Your Fan A Robot?

Let's just pick a random and very active digger, OptimusPrime01, off of one of my submits:

He's been a member, as of today, for around 210 days. Let's look at his activity:

He has 10,000+ diggs in 210 days. Given some vacation time in there we're looking at 50 per day. That is a LOT of time digging. But if you work at the DMV or IBM I guess you have plenty of time.

I think Opty is a human because he passes a curosory turing test:

• An eclectic voting record - all around the block
• I've shouted him back a few times and he doesn't always vote.
• There are 221 comments, which is more than one a day.
• The comments are clearly from someone who is a native English speaker, so no obvious outsourcing
• His profile is very human and has had a lot of changes.

The only thing that makes me raise my eyebrows is that his "popular" record is very very high at 9%, which either means that he's a hardworking SEO/SEM or just a dedicated digger. I come down on the side of digger with a lot of free time on his hands! (Heck, SEO's are allowed to be diggers, as long as they don't brag. :-)

Commentary on Comments

I have many friends whose native language is not English and am from the deep South, so I'm pretty relaxed about syntax and vocabulary. But it is a dead giveaway when a "23 year old girl from New York" uses words like "compliance" or is shouting you with: "Please to digg rapidly my submits." It's a dead giveaway for a robot or a sock puppet.

Human Or Robot, Part Deux?

I recently posted a digg (Best. Digg. Shout. Ever.) about a hysterical shout I got from a user called SteJules. I admit that I didn't take much time before deciding to post his shout because (without torturing you with the screen shots), he'd been a digg member for 31 days and had over 10K diggs and had a 20% hot rate. You don't have to look at stuff like that for a minute to realize it is a robot plus a really good linkbait writer.

If you looked more closely at his stories, half of them were chaff to disguise the other half linking to his websites. So his hot-rate for the stuff he cared about was closer to 40%.

Wow.

He's been banned now, so obviously discretion is the better part of robotics. But his stories are still up, still flowing traffic to his websites, and still garnering links from bloggers that dug his stuff. And since digg membership is free, it is hard to see what the human behind SteJules lost.

Robot Networks?

Oh, no doubt. Let's look at one of SteJule's friends, oboy. He's been a member since Jan/8/2008, or around 90 days. He has 24,000+ diggs. To avoid having you do what I did and drop the zero, that works out to 266 diggs/day.

[Update: DoshDosh says that oboy is human, but I still say that that rate of daily diggs is astounding. If each navigate/review/digg took 10 to 15 seconds each you'd have an hour of pretty furious activit a day!]

[Double update: I should not do math in public.  I have corrected my math above from 400 to 266 diggs/day.]

How Does A Human Fight Robots?

Don't. You can't. And it is not your job to police digg. They have staff and tools - I think the average lifespan of an obvious robot on digg is just a few months. I suspect that oboy will be gone shortly.

My suggestion is to take a walk among the less popular stories and digg/friend those people.

And look at your "fans" before you friend them. If they look too active or otherwise too good to be true, well, you might want to avoid them.