Online Media Cultist

The biggest fallacy that social news sites like Digg perpetrate is that their voting systems are organic, run by the community, that every story has an equal chance – based upon its merits – to reach the front page and find acclaim, and so on. It’s just not true, and likely never will be. The problem is that the more popular a social news site gets, there are that many more people submitting stories, that many more people trying to rig or manipulate the system to their benefit.

So it behooves social news sites to continually tweak the rules to appease each of its groups of users. I really like former-Netscape General Manager Jason Calacanis’ 80-19-1 rule here. This states that 80 percent of your audience will never participate (they will simply consume information), 19 percent will partake in such activities as voting and commenting, and one percent are your hard core users: the engine that keeps social news sites alive by submitting volumes of stories and participating in all parts of the site.

So the “big three” of social news sites – Digg, Reddit, and Netscape – all do tweak the rules, but Digg in particular is cagey about this, always harkening back to how the community rules the kingdom.

The truth is though that many people feel that a small group of “power users” controls a high percentage of stories that reaches Digg’s front page. Therefore, it can be construed that the community has relatively little influence on Digg at all, that a small oligarchy of sorts actually forms the editorial board that selects the stories that hit the front page (and therefore finds a huge audience of readers) each day.

Brian Carr, in “Is Digg Broken Beyond Repair?” asserts that Digg’s top 25 “power users” control as much as 70% of what reaches the front page. He then offers four solutions to “break” the oligarchy. Three of these, in my view, aren’t all that useful as they involve voting for spam, not voting at all, or boycotting the submissions process.

One solution though does point to the reality of the modern popular social news site: create alliances. Digg itself allows for this in that you can add friends to your profile. Theoretically, people can visit their friends’ profiles each day and vote for stories submitted by each one. However, the line here between friendly cooperation and “gaming” the system can get somewhat hazy.

But the fact is that for a story to have any chance at all of reaching Digg’s front page, it needs some level of pre-determined support. Once Digg publicly confronts this reality, it will be able to better respond to the complexities manifested by its own success.