[laberge]

Well the fact rests, the community generally believed that there was a ton of promoted stories because, you guys never told anyone otherwise or did a poor job communicating.

And im certain promoted stories did exist, I remember them clearly marked as that.

[SupermanScott]

Digg ads existed that were placed in the feed at slot 3 and 14 which were introduced in v3: http://about.digg.com/blog/ads-you-can-digg%E2%80%A6or-bury

They were ads that were pieces of content. Digg was in front of this trend with promoted tweets / stories.