It’s a good post and great food for thought. In the book, James Surowiecki distinguishes between Information Cascades — where everyone follows everyone else — and properly wise crowds — where everyone thinks independently but the “correct answer” is the median of all their responses. I think digg is arguably susceptible to information cascades — for many users, the only stories they see are already on the front page and thus only news that has already been promoted gets promoted further. This can create some quite bizarre valuations for stories.

Evolving Trends — Digg’s Biggest Flaw!

This post explains and demonstrates a real flaw in digg’s service model that helps promote hype on the Web, causing a “dumbing down” effect on culture, with serious consequences to society. Having said that, the experimental evidence and logic supplied here apply equally to other Web 2.0 social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, reddit, and netscape beta.

Fact: trusted individuals are once again the source of news in a society (bloggers) Fact: word of mouth is once again how news spreads (viral marketing) Fact: people once again hunt and gather in a group (del.icio.us) Fact: people once again group things using words like small, big, happy, sad, funny, food rather than detailed hierarchical structures (tags) Fact: impulsive production (minimal upfront planning vs. a lot of upfront planning) is back in style (Google “betas”) Fact: once again, sharing between people does not conform to a strict concept of economic reciprocity but rather to the concept that what is good for all is good for one (YouTube, del.icio.us, etc.) These are all traits of a hunter-gatherer society, i.e. a pre-agricultural society. Tens of thousands of years of behavioral evolution wiped out in just a few years.