twopointouch

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.