Recommended Flaw: 31% of Digg Homepage submitted by 10 Users
popfail.com
popfail.com
> (let bys (map [_ 'by] (beststories nil 1000))
(/ (apply + (map cadr
(firstn 10
(sort (compare > cadr)
(dedup (map [list _ (count _ bys)]
bys))))))
1000))
.258
nickb 77
edw519 34
markbao 26
bdfh42 20
nreece 19
ajbatac 18
wumi 17
prakash 16
smanek 16
ilamont 15I speak to JD all the time (he wrote the article) and we've been looking at these numbers again every couple of hours for the last couple days, and the 31% that he wrote about (it hovers around the 30% mark) is fairly consistent when looking at the last 500 frontpaged stories.
One thing he didn't write about was that at the time if you expanded it out to top 28 users, that number was around 51% of Digg's frontpage stories.
Around 5am this morning (for me, about 5 hours ago), we ran the numbers again and at that particular time, one user was accounting for 53 of the last 500 frontpaged stories on his own.
Not going to say the data is conclusive or anything, because I frankly just dont know, but when you consider Digg says they have something like 23 million uniques a month and well over 1 million registered users, 50% of their frontpage traffic being dictated by less than 30 users is a little strange.
Not saying thats a bad thing either, because I believe that good content should have the best possible chance of getting noticed - it's just the Recommendation Engine has widened the gap recently between the top users and the large majority of the site.
Edit: Steve Huffman just reported the number for Reddit, and it's a lot lower than Digg's: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238290
I failed to mention these on accident, but here are a couple more stats to give a little more insight into how the update has affected things.
Pre Recommendation Engine, the top 10 only accounted for between 12-17% of stories on Digg's frontpage, the #1 digger Pre-RE (MrBabyMan) now barely registers post update (he was tied for 11th at the time of the article).
percent of stories on homepage by top 10
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percent of stories submitted total by top 10
percent of stories on homepage by non-top n
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percent of stories submitted total by non-top n
You can see something similar at http://top.searchyc.com/points_per_submission . That shows you the top users (on YC at least) by points per submission.
http://top.searchyc.com/points_per_comment is even more interesting in my opinion
I do trust that Reddit does have a more robust top-user base, but I'm curious about the context.
There isn't really an analogous concept on Digg since there is no notion of hottness and links don't rise and fall. Links just appear at the top of the front page at some point.
"Amazon's rankings establish a formal, public competition for power or its online equivalent, recognition...
To the extent that competitive energies drive Top Reviewers and their nemeses to generate content, and to spend time on and publicize Amazon.com, the chief beneficiary of misuse of Amazon.com's ranking system is Amazon itself."
What's interesting is what happened after Digg's algo change in January. That algo change was supposed to increase diversity of users making the front page. It had the exact opposite effect.
In the future when we have thousands of new stories published after the Recommendation Engine being available for everyone, the same analysis would be very interesting to do again then.
It boils down to whether you have enough data or not.
I would guess that there a few groups of users, with approximate proportions:
Lurkers: 70% Diggers: 20% Submitters: 10% Regular Submitters: <1%
.. is there anyone from Digg here that can confirm this? :)
The people at the top, for whatever reason, work very hard to get there.
But for returning users we have a personalized front page, and on top of that the posts are diversified so each topic and person gets fair attention the way YOU want it.