http://www.scribd.com/doc/5735/Digging-for-Diggers-Analysis-of-a-Social-Media-Website

In response to the other 3 posts about Digg.com, I was able to find a recently posted paper published for a class at Georgia Tech that studies the practices and complaints of the top Digg users. I will assume you know basic knowledge of how Digg works. If not check out the other 3 blog posts. Since the paper is based on interviews with 20 or so of the top Digg users, the paper’s emphasis is on the controversy caused by Digg’s shift of approach when it decided to remove the list of top 100 users in an effort to “balance out the playing field”. Before the removal, users were ranked by a complex algorithm that factored in their popularity (how popular their submissions were), the popularity of their friends, the number of submissions, the number of buries, etc. Since the removal of the list, top users feel as if they’ve been “stripped” of their identity in relation to other digg users, and this has apparently had a negative impact on the social aspect of the site. Diggers are unpaid and one of the main motivators for being a top contributer was the power and recognition. Now, there is less motivation to make friends and interact because one doesn’t know who to befriend in order to gain popularity. On the other hand, Digg has effectively made the site more democratic and in this sense is accommodating for their increasing user population. The content now will be less biased because there will be less “vote trading” among the top users.

One can view this shift of approach as a sustenance of the popular nodes. As a whole Digg is looking to find the best content among the entire community. They have basically eliminated the notion of those who hold monopolies of influence. What has resulted however is a community with two levels of interaction. The top level is the active community - those who have friends on digg, chat via aim, send emails, etc. The other level are the users who go on digg looking for content, burying, digging and who never interact with other users. Digg seems to be reaching out to the second level because that is where the majority of the users are. So although the elimination of the list may seem destructive and not for the greater good, Digg saw many advantages in doing so, which this paper points out clearly. The paper also discusses other interesting issues at hand, which include deviant behavior and the problem of having more and more articles to sift through and sort out in the queue.