InDIGGnation at Digg, and the reality of social networks

A few Digg users have "ganged up" on certain SEO blogs that they don't like by flagging them as Spam. Digg automatically bans a site after it has been flagged as Spam by some number of users. The recently banned sites are clearly not spammers, but that doesn't seem to matter to Digg. Lee Odden expressed his indignation at being banned by Digg.

Digg is a "community" site where users submit stories or blog posts they believe are interesting. Other users vote for, or "digg" the story if they like it. The more diggs a story gets the higher it ranks on the Digg home page. Digg can drive a lot of traffic. Personally, I don't use Digg and derive no traffic from it.

As with any community it is possible for a very small but active group to dominate and sway the whole community. I have called this "The 1% rule of social communities".

Most social communities on the web have this profile. About 1% of the community actually creates and contributes most of the content. Another 10% synthesize, or in Digg's case vote, and the vast majority just consume. Digg also uses voting and flagging by users to "bury" stories or flag something as "spam" or off topic. The number of votes needed to bury or ban a story or site are unknown but they appear to be pretty low.

In a social community like Digg a relatively small number of users can promote something to prominence, or demote it to irrelevance. There have been several stories of small "clicks" or users banding together to artificially inflate the popularity of their stories, and trading "diggs" with each other.

Jason Calacanis offered to pay the top Digg contributors $1,000 a month to post stories and vote on the competing Netscape site. Jason knew that the top 50 users accounted for more than 80% of the content that showed up on Digg's front page.

The small but active minority sways the balance in politics too. In almost any election in the past 50 years the losing candidate gets about 40% of the vote. So, it is a given that each candidate will get 40%, leaving the 20% in the middle to decide who wins. It only takes 10.1% of that middle group to decide the winner. It gets worse. Only about 50% of eligible voters actually vote. So, that 10.1% of voters actually represents about 5% of all eligible voters who decide the winner.

Online social communities work the same way. A small active minority do the work and make the decisions for the community as a whole. It usually works well, but sometimes the power gets to their heads and they make bad, self serving, decisions. It looks like Digg needs to review their policies.

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Comments

[Alfred Thompson]

I don't use Digg either preferring to look at links referenced by people I know personally. That seems to be more reliable. I have been "Digged" if that is the term a couple of times. One time it sent me a lot of traffic - on the order of 10 times my usual traffic. But honestly it didn't go to any of the posts I really thought was important or meaningfull. A couple of people thought it interesting and things snowballed. The system seems more capricious than rational.
It seems strange to me that on the Internet with so many millions of people there are small numbers of people who have an elevated influence. There are top 100 lists were “votes” of some sort from a few hundred people (or fewer is smaller categories) can place someone high enough that they appear to be influential. But you have to wonder if they are big fish in small ponds or if they really mean something in the greater world outside the blogging “echo chamber.”

[hata]

Digg™ criticism from around the web - http://digghater.com/

[Jeffrey Henderson]

Here's another example of Digg censorship.

http://www.wikiprotest.com/index.php?title=Digg_bans_PrisonPlanet.com%21%21%21

[Jason G. Williscroft]

They're capricious, all right. Digg just banned our domain!

They say they did it because of Terms of Use violations, but that’s absurd… among the three of us, we only submitted 20 posts over the three days we were live. We suspect they actually banned us because of the content of our posts, which were mainly excerpts from a book by one of us debunking human-caused climate change.

We want to be reinstated in the Digg index. Not so much out of love for Digg, mind you, as to make a point. Read our story at http://thedeadhand.com/reinstatement.aspx, and if you're so moved there's a link on the page that will shoot an e-mail to Digg on our behalf.

Regards,

Jason G. Williscroft
The Dead Hand