In January, there was an interesting post on the Scientific American Observations blog about the “most hated Digg comment.” Commenting on Digg works in much the same way that news stories do. Someone posts the comment, and other users “digg” or “bury” the comment based on whether or not the comment is interesting, relevant, or anything else the user cares about. An interesting property of these comments, as with the news stories, is that once a story becomes popular, more and more people digg it, due to exposure. The stories that get buried usually suffer the opposite fate. They get no exposure, so they just stay at a low number of diggs, and never make it to the main page of Digg.

However, comments that are highly buried do not go unnoticed. Instead of being deleted, they are left on the page, although they become grayed-out, so they do not seem so prominent. But because the comment is still left on the page, it can still be read and evaluated by the users on the page. This happened to an extreme degree in the story highlighted by the SciAm blog. Because a disliked comment happened to be right at the top of the page, thus being viewed by thousands of users, those same thousands often looked at the comment, and decided to go with the majority and bury the comment further.

This says something about the nature of Digg, that has been highlighted by two other previous posts, and goes along with the general “Hubs and Authorities” nature of the Internet, along with the flaws it creates. Just as Google Bombs place irrelevant results at the top of a Google search result page, comments that don’t deserve to be seen by everyone still exist on highly-dugg pages, attracting more attention than should be there.

All in all, the fact that the one comment was buried so slow is due not so much to the fact that Digg users didn’t like it, but rather is due mostly to the underlying network structure of Digg, placing a highly-disliked comment where many are forced into seeing it.