Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?

Well this is interesting.

A mysterious @LtGenPanda writes:

Digg recently published a blog post titled “Digg’s Algorithmic Mystery Tour” on October, 15th. While a Digg blog post is a normal thing, a post about the algorithm was very surprising to me. Why did Digg, which never bothers to blog about very visible changes, numerous bugs and issues, decided to blog about its secret “algorithm”? They never even verbally discussed it in public. Since the announcement, the front page stories have changed. A lot of sites not found much on the front page of Digg since the v4 fiasco; started to resurface frequently. Many diggers noticed this and there has been a lot of chatter about this. Many diggers wondered, how did such a small ‘tweak’ to the algorithm cause so much change to the front page. I wondered this as well.

Because I found this so strange I wanted to find an answer at least for my own edification. The main reason for my curiosity was that most of these sites never got enough diggs prior to the ‘algo’ change to make it anywhere close to “top news.”  I play all the time with the various social network APIs (Digg, Twitter, Google, Facebook etc). This is more of a hobby to me. What started as a casual search for an answer has now turned out to be what I think is a major revelation –- big enough for me to go public about it. Essentially what I think I have discovered is that someone has created dozens of accounts, in order to make sure that Digg’s publishing partners get front pages on the site, so that those sites get Digg referrals. They certainly had not been getting many Digg referrals in the last several weeks before the recent ‘algo’ change.

You are going to have to click through to read more, but from what I can tell this man has done his research. By remaining anonymous and posting this on a throw-away Tumblr, LtGenPanda makes himself off as nothing more than a concerned (and disgruntled?) digger.

Oh, and for added confirmation LtGenPanda analyzes the before/after data:

And now I present you with details of the last digg activity by the fake IDs. Again, I stress here that I went public about this topic at 6:34 PM CST. From 5:33 PM to 6:34 PM no one but digg knew about this. My server time (the system used to compute the time values below) and the desktop I use to email are about 6 to 7 minutes out of sync. 

So, once I told them that I have a major accusation with shocking findings, they already expected this and as soon as the link was received, within minutes this operation ceased. Thanks Digg! - for confirming.

On a technical side: Digg can only ban accounts but cannot stop accounts from digging. So, if this was from some exterior group, digg would have only banned them as they cannot stop them from digging.

It seems as though Dig has dug its own grave with this one.