When folks think of Digg, they're often misled into believing that the content seen on the homepage is representative of what a wide base of Internet users think is news-worthy and important. The numbers tell a different story - that of all stories that make it to the front page of Digg, more than 20% come from a select group of 20 users. Digg isn't shy about hiding this fact, their top users page plainly displays the statistics:
Digg's Top Users Page
These Top 20 have contributed a total of 5257 stories that have reached the frontpage out of a total of 25,260 stories to ever reach that page - 20.81% to be exact. Many of these top users have, as Digg terms it, a popular ratio of 30% and higher, meaning that almost 1 out of every 3 stories they submit will reach the homepage. Several users (specifically DarkHack & OsterMayer) have popular ratios of over 60%.
A logical extension shows that the top 100 Digg Users have contributed 14,249 stories to the homepage, or 56.41%. At Digg, a very select group of users is dominating the popular homepage content. Far from being a mass of opinion, Digg is instead showing, primarily, the content opinions of just a few, select folks.
There's certainly nothing wrong with this - it's not a secret or a problem and it isn't hurting Digg's popularity, reputation or importance. But, it is something that many folks who use the site don't realize and many marketers or folks attempting to use it to promote their content should be aware of. Like the college frathouse, it pays to know the right people at Digg.
UPDATE: A few good addendums from the comments and some folks in our office that should be included:
- Cameron Olthius points out that Digg's front-page algo favors submissions from historically successful users and that those users frequently have large bases of friend groups, helping to make their submissions more visible from the start
- Digg's populist power could be compared well to the del.icio.us/popular list, where a huge number of submitters contribute the content (though it's harder to tell unless you're looking at scraped results over time).
- It was noted that heavy users of Reddit & others typically contribute in a very similar way, so Digg is by no means an outlier in this fashion.
I certainly hate Digg. They actually banned about 100 Digitalpoint members or such. I took the time to find the real spammers, that made stupid diggs. Those users are still ON.
Digg hates SEO's and their story. I hate them back.
And anyway Rand, you are right. The frontpage links are NOT relevant and community chosen. They are directed by the heavy and old payroll members.
it's all good. because there is evidence out there to suggest that aggregators like digg are going to be devalued gradually by SEs.
but that goes for any website and users.
often 20% of the users make up 80% of the traffic.
the 80/20 rule
https://digg.com/topusers
Come now,
Top Diggers are probably NOT apart of any great conspiracy or on any payroll
Although this thread is TECHNICALLY about the TOP 20 -
It would be VERY difficult to force HUNDREDs if not THOUSANDs of people to DIGG a submission.
Before Digg, some people submitted tech links to Forums - and the only measurement of Popularity was PageViews - and an occassional "THANK YOU" - Digg just offers a MEASURABLE way to gauge the popularity of topics archived on one site
https://digg.com/users/SearchEngines/homepage
Nice Diggbait Rand,
I give you the official award for the "Easiest way to get a post dugg with the least amount of effort"..
:)
Keep up the good work
Yeah - when Matt told me it got Dugg, I was pretty infuriated - "What, that got Dugg and the Page Strength Tool didn't!" But, I suppose a Digg isn't necessarily a bad thing...
Hi Rand,
Don't worry about digg. Danny loved it and I blogged about it too. Great tool!
Here is the post at ReveNews: How "Strong" Are Your Website Pages?
Cheers, Carsten
Netscape.com wants to pay some of these dudes 1 g a month to migrate to it. I'll pay double! Just joking...
This could be attributted to the natural occurence of a pareto distribution see also here and here
I think it's mostly because of a few things:
1: They submit a lot of stories.
2: They're daily readers and know how likely it is for a story to reach the frontpage.
I am quite certain that people don't digg stories based on who submitted it - so no one is really controlling anything.
There are only so many cool stories and so on to be submitted during a day. If 20 people are hardcore enough, it's not very hard to submit every cool story 20 seconds after it has been posted on CNN.com, YouTube, or wherever.
My main point is that I don't think users digg stories based on submitter and thus no one really controls anything.
Greg - Also for a couple other reasons.
1. Digg has an algorithm and votes carry more weight from users that have a high number of submitted stories that have reached the homepage. If you watch digg, a lot of times stories these guys submit will reach the homepage after 20-30 diggs compared with the normal 40-50.
2. The top users have a large friend base. When their friends see that they've submitted a story they'll follow suit.
Right. But I still think it has 95% to do with the story submitted and perhaps 5% to do with who submitted it. So I think it'd be much more accurate to say, "The top 100 users on digg have a very slight influence on the stories which make it to the frontpage.", rather than they "control" it.
"I am quite certain that people don't digg stories based on who submitted it - so no one is really controlling anything."
That's pretty naive. If you have some of those Top 20 on your Friends list, you're more likely to see when they post something, when they digg something, and generally be influenced by them. I'd be interested in seeing how many people are friends of these individuals ... I bet they're high on the list of people with the most friends, too.
I agree. They influence it but not control. No where near it, in my opinion. I stick to my 95% story, 5% who submitted it theory. :-)
Greg, please think about Casinos. At roulette the Casino has less than 51% chance to win. Still, more than 99% the Casino wins. If it is true that top users has 1% more chance to promote their post to the front page than 56% is too few and will rise. These are the hard rules of statistics and Digg admins should be aware of this if they want to avoid a site with 10 people posting successfully only which definitely kills Digg.
Tiger
Tiger
GregH, that makes no sense.
1. If you submit a larger number of stories -- everything else being equal -- the percentage that is popular should go down, not up, because you are being less discriminate.
2. Your second point contradicts your first point. If they were being particularly judicious about selecting stories they would not be submitting a larger number (as you claim in your first point) but a smaller number.
Basically these folks are either (1) playing the system or (2) really popular, depending on what kind of spin you want to put on it. Either way they clearly have a lot of friends who help them get their items dugg.
I think you are not getting the point here...please read the entire post again
yes, Greg, you are very naive. I am an SEO specialist, and I've seen litterally dozens of "Digg, Technorati, Stumbie communities" that, all they do all day is sit around and trade diggs, faves and stumbles.
Just like with all SEO, it's no accident what gets on the "front page"
How Digg operates and gets away with it is beyond me. I registered a little while ago and posted a couple of stories from my blog. First my domain got banned because some people flagged it as spam seeing it was from my own domain.
The stories I posted got dugg pretty good but all over sudden dissapeared.
Then my account got deleted because of abuse.
I have mailed both the feedback and abuse address asking what the reason for this is, but I'm still waiting for a reply after 5 days...
Digg is too bigg to be run effecient by the looks of it.
Your comment is very informative. I continue to be dumbfounded at the closed nature of the supposedly open internet. I write daily in my blog and ping Technorati, upload to del.icio.us, furl and google's IG service. I read the logs and see the bots coming through every single day, but they index NADA. Thanks for illuminating the way so that I won't keep pushing on a waste of time at digg.
I would be interested to learn of any truly open aggregators who will truly index what you ping over.
Thanks again and keep it up
Mike
Maybe some of you would like OgOg.org better ?
It does differentiate between those who can blog, and those who can click, and it is fully transparent... Give it a try.
The more I study SEO and the Internet, the more I realise that if you want to be successful, it's not only about getting to the top of Google.
More importantly, what really matters is, how big mailing list, or even better, social networks friends, you are able to build over time.
I use digg frequently and get decent traffic from it. It's my #3 referer after google and my blog. Does anyone know how to increase the number of diggs or placement on digg? Is it just about adding as many friends as possible and blasting articles out?
I couldn't help it but your post made me think about the social implications of these Digg user statistics. Maybe 100% community control is an ideology that simply doesn't work in practice. It seems so that in every human community eventually some will rise to the top and take control while others prefer to take a more passive approach. Probably that's just human nature and there's nothing to do about it, web 2.0 or not.
Big thing is not just to climb to top, but is to stay on top for such a long time that people remember ur username even when u r not at top, and so come back to your profile!!!
I have been using digg for nearly 3 years, and what I have noticed is, people digg stories from reliable or popular sites only. It is very hard to make even the best of the story out there to make it to the home page if it is not from an extablished site.
I believe this has happened because the webmasters that believe in spamming the whole internet with duplicate content, and submitting their stories to sites like digg, have put a bad impression on general internet user-base. In these 3 years I have noticed that people hate ads, they hate old things told by a new website (but they accpet it when it is told by an old and popular website).
In short, digg is losing its reputation, and is now more than 80% controlled by the big sites that even pay some users to make the stories to the top page.
I have become irregular at digg for the same reason because all I see is same political fight, same gadget talk, and same health problems.
I guess, there are more "paid users" on digg now than the genuine diggers. I was offered $10 per week for 20 submissions as my "make popular" ratio is quite good. I accepted that amount for three weeks and then left digg forever because its all fake. Marketing is eating every one. Money is destroying everything.
Digg has recently removed the list of their top users, apparently in order to protect them from complaints and abusive comments.
I think in some ways Digg is like high school, where everybody listens to the popular folk, but in other ways any John or Jane Doe can have a special day where his/her post gets to the front page.
how else would i learn about 9 Underrated Sandwiches. lol
I can work for less than half a G. lol. i wish I could work as the weird content provider.
I was banned from Digg because I was critical of all the endless left-leaning stories making it to the politics front page. BloodJunkie is the top submitter to the politics section, and his submissions are a steady cycle of links to left-wing blog op-eds, essentially driving traffic for advertising revenues, and the stories always hit the front page. Submissions that espoused opposing viewpoints or even corrected previous submissions got buried if BloodJunkie and his network of buddies didn't like them. Just pointing this out in comments got me modded down regularly, even if it was done in a calm, mature manner.
I gave up on Digg when I realized it was not community-driven at all, and that an upper cabal of users actually controls what gets posted--there is as much editorial control and bias as there is at any other site run by a group of editors. I was not surprised at all to see BloodJunkie at #3 in the top user list. Geez, what a crock. They called me crazy and modded me down for saying this about BloodJunkie and others, yet there's the list for all to see!
Digg, as a whole, is extremely biased toward the left. I think BloodJunkie's success is because of that and not because he is BloodJunkie. I'm sure it helps but nothing substantial. I bet that if a new user submitted the same stories with the same titles and descriptions; they still would have made it to the frontpage. At least 90%+ of them.
As anyone who has actively participated in Digg via submitting articles, the top people don't necessarily control the site. They just submit the articles before anyone else. At this time I am ranked at 488 on Digg. All the time I try and submit cool stuff as soon as I find out about, but you know what happens 75% of the time, one of those top users beats me to it. One of the guys on my friends list is in the top 5 and it is crazy how quickly he submits news after it is published. He must just sit there waiting for his RSS feeder to show something new.
Digg is not gamed though, they are just very aggressive/active.
Pure crazyness
The top 10 richest people in America account for the top 60% of what makes it to our eyes and ears. I completely made that up, but the point is it's all the same pattern on many different scales in may different industries and aspects of life. This sounds similar to the old Dmoz editor bit where a few people ended up having a lot of power.
Just waiting for the news that somebody's been caught for paying these people to "flavor " their submissions.
Sounds a lot like the old adage (read: lie) that 20% of somesuch thing make up 80% of some other thing.
I have been fascinated by the series of events and have tried to reason out why/why not this was a right step by Kevin on my blog post here: https://www.technacular.com/2007/02/02/top-dig... Would appreciate your thoughts on the same.
Regards,
Vikas
https://www.technacular.com
I guess you could call them the "Filthy Digging Rich."
This is the “Mathew effect” where a disproportionate level of attention goes to people who are already famous and not necessarily to people who might be more deserving of the attention.
i agree that digg is not community-driven at all. i joined it a few days ago and was amazed to see some of the stories getting dugg 500+, 1000+, sometimes even 2000+ times. and then i viewed some recent stories. Some were better than what was being shown on the homepage but were languishing with 20, 10 or even less diggs. The thing is when someone influential there posts a story, it already gets a headstart with 100 to 200 diggs and other people just seeing the number digg the story too in a follow-the-herd sort of mentality.
although i understand everthing eventually ends up with a lot of power in the hands of a few, whats unacceptable here is some sites unreasonably getting much more popularity than many other deserving ones.
It somewhat becomes like a newspaper with only the opinions and referrals of a few essentially getting counted.
This is absolutely true, go read our entry on Digg's Frontpage Algorithm here. Abosolute proof if Digg's Frontpage Algorithm is totally unfair and has failed to deliver what they always had promised - community control.
Sly Bets are running a Digg and Delicious contest. https://slybets.com/contests-and-promotions/co...
Wonder if they will get banned like most of Digital Point?
Nice example of the group is smarter than the few huh?
Diggers hate SEOs? How about you start a group of SEO diggers that would publish articles according to a pre-determined schedule? For example, you digg Rand, Rebecca and Frank on Monday. Daniel, Mike and Tom on Tuesday, etc. For 5 diggs/day over a month you would need 140 users, meaning once a month you would digg an article that would get over 100 diggs from group members, plus their digg friends and random diggs. Not too bad right? Although since Digg recently changed its algorithm to fight group voting, make sure group members don't add each other as friend on Digg.