http://www.shmula.com/197/digg-as-a-game

This article discusses how Digg is similar to something called the “Urn Game”. This “game” quite simply shows the ideas of information cascades. In short, there are two identical urns, W (filled with mostly x-colored balls and some y-colored balls) and Z (filled with mostly y-colored balls and some x-colored). Everyone takes one ball from the same urn and makes a guess at which urn they picked from. Obviously, after hearing some people’s guesses, your answer will be affected by what they say, leading to an information cascade and conformity even if your ball signals the opposite urn but everyone else’s points to the other. Digg is similar to this game because a few “powerful” early voters can vote for (or against) a story and everyone else’s votes will start to follow.

As we learned in class, the users on Digg may be making rational choices given all the signals they are getting. However, the signals (which is the number of votes a story has gotten) give little information about why the users are voting for it (perhaps they are just following the signals they saw). Therefore, the user’s own feelings about the story may be ignored or at least not as highly considered. More importantly, information cascades on Digg are less fragile than the ones we discussed in class. Because Digg only shows votes in the positive direction, voters get no signals that anybody is voting against (burying) the story, which means you can never start an information cascade against a story.

The article then suggests a two-part way to help Digg avoid such strong information cascades in order to create a less biased news. First, users must all be equal. This suggestion could be good or bad. It makes it harder for people to have the power to push a bad story to the top because the “credible” sources don’t have more weight than anyone else. However, if the “credible” source does somehow have better information, it is not recognized at all. The second part is to only show profile and number of votes for the top stories, thus eliminating the number of votes impacting new stories. This idea prevents people from voting with the crowd, as they won’t know what the crowd thinks until it’s on the front page. Keep in mind, the author notes that implementing his solution would make Digg less social, however, as social connections become stronger, you are more likely to be influenced by and thus conform to the choices your connections make. Therefore, there seems to be a give and take relationship between a social site and a news site that provides many diverse viewpoints.