Understanding digg again, natural order

My first attempts to under­stand digg, the news-​​voting site, were a bit of a shambles, to be honest. I tried to work out the order and content of the front page and ended up in a tangle of half-​​remembered Maths lessons. Owen Byrne, senior software engineer at the service, put me out of my misery by com­menting that the order was actually chro­no­lo­gical according the time stories were promoted to the top. I also com­mented on the import­ance of rate and topic, which may have been less useless.

Yesterday, Fred Stutzman posted some­thing to revive my interest. He was talking about the moaning and groaning about the power of top users and the voting blocs around them. Essentially, he says the reason for this is because we need some way to sort through the thou­sands of stories sub­mitted to digg. Users can’t read them all, a lot of them are spam anyway, and so we develop coping mechanisms.

One such mech­anism comes through the ‘friends’ func­tions offered by the site. If someone becomes known to you for sub­mit­ting the links you like to read, then it makes sense to make them your friend. You then check out the links they submit ahead of the random morass sub­mitted by everyone else. Since, they’re what you like, you’ll vote for them too, won’t you? You may also have a sneaking sus­pi­cion that this earns kudos from your new friend. This becomes self-​​perpetuating since those users’ links will be promoted and so followed by the next gen­er­a­tion of new users. The so-​​called voting blocs actually rep­resent interest groups. Stutzman draws a parallel between digg top users and the blo­go­sphere A-​​list: it’s a self-​​sustaining and nat­ur­ally formed elite, he says.

If this is the case, and I think it might be, then the front page of digg actually becomes irrel­evant to heavy users. Or maybe even a score­board for the clans to which they belong. They know that their friends will provide the enough of the best links to satisfy their hunger for new pages, and they’re a tried and trusted source. An exper­i­enced digg user pre­sum­ably goes straight to their friends’ sub­mitted, dugg and com­mented pages. The front page becomes a recruit­ment aide for the major groups and users.

Alex Bosworth com­mented that friends engage in tit-​​for-​​tat co-​​operation when it comes to diggs. He suddenly noticed that his 39 ‘friends’ — none of whom he’d com­mu­nic­ated with — were voting for the same stories as him. As I’ve posted else­where, digg is both a social network and a news voting site. There’s a vested interest in voting for the sites proposed by your clan, since it means that the sites you submit yourself stand a greater chance of pro­mo­tion. In some cases, such as where clans are formed from pressure groups, co-​​operation comes from the common interest of the entire group. Of course, not all digg users realise they are in a clan by having friends, but the end result may be the same as if they did.

I suppose that new users only see the front page, don’t know that there’s an olig­archy and simply expect the best links to float to the top. Of course, that isn’t true. The best links, the ones on the front page, are (a) intensely sub­jective and (b) will rep­resent the interests of the most powerful groups. Fortunately, the most powerful groups rep­resent interests diverse enough to ensure that pop­u­la­tion of digg isn’t decreasing (though it isn’t growing very fast anymore either).

This is self-​​perpetuating. New users will only return to digg if the major topics of interest are of interest to them. That means they are a poten­tial clan member. It’s also a poten­tial hazard. If only users in a clan can expect front pages for their sub­mis­sions, then the emphasis on quality can become a lot less important than the emphasis on where it’s from.

In many respects, it simply doesn’t matter, though. Being featured on digg is a very tem­porary boost to ratings that won’t add much to your bottom line. People looking for inter­esting new articles and sites do not become regular readers, by and large. The dif­fi­culty, I suppose, is the position of digg among tech­no­logy news sites…

Elsewhere: Ed Yourdon visited digg HQ this week and posted a great primer on the service.

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• 347 words from digg’s Kevin Rose
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