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Recommended Flaw: 31% of Digg Homepage submitted by 10 Users
- ojbyrne 18y agoOn the scale of bitching about digg (which I'm known to do :-)) this one doesn't rank. Given the various power laws out there, I'd say that it's actually pretty diverse. The people at the top, for whatever reason, work very hard to get there.
- Mapou 18y ago"The people at the top, for whatever reason, work very hard to get there." And what do they get in return?
- aswanson 18y agoNothing new: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
- bdotdub 18y agoyup, nothing new. That might even be a good percentage :) http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html
- pg 18y agoIt looks like the number on News.YC is about 26%. > (let bys (map [_ 'by] (beststories nil 1000)) (/ (apply + (map cadr (firstn 10 (sort (compare > cadr) (dedup (map [list _ (count _ bys)] bys)))))) 1000)) .258 This is the fraction of the 1000 top-scoring stories in the past month or so (http://news.ycombinator.com/best http://news.ycombinator.com/best) submitted by the top 10 submitters. Who incidentally are: nickb 77 edw519 34 markbao 26 bdfh42 20 nreece 19 ajbatac 18 wumi 17 prakash 16 smanek 16 ilamont 15
- aswanson 18y agoFor some reason, that code sample makes me want to investigate lisp.
- froo 18y agoHey Paul, I 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.
- pg 18y agoIt doesn't seem strange to me. The top submitters aren't dictating the stories. They're just submitting them first. And it doesn't seem at all unlikely that a few dedicated users could be the first to find a large fraction of the stories that ultimately became popular.
- froo 18y agoThey're not always submitting them first either though. Users like MakiMaki and MrBabyMan (Maki and Andy are both great guys btw) often resubmit other users stories to get them frontpaged. 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.
- pg 18y ago
- dhotson 18y agoThis isn't all that surprising to me. 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? :)
- froo 18y agoI dont know the specific numbers - but I guess if you looked at a site like socialblade.com you could probably guesstimate the submitters/regular submitters number.
- ojbyrne 18y agoYou could probably get this from the digg api, lurkers coming from various traffic figures out there. I'd guess the proportion of lurkers is actually a little higher than that.
- wallflower 18y agoRelated reading: "The murky demimonde of Amazon's top reviewers" "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." http://www.slate.com/id/2182002/pagenum/all http://www.slate.com/id/2182002/pagenum/all
- spez 18y agoOver the last week, 6% of the top stories were submitted by top-10 users on reddit.
- ivankirigin 18y agoWhat are "top" stories? My front page shows 100 stories on reddit -- the default is higher than Digg right? I do trust that Reddit does have a more robust top-user base, but I'm curious about the context.
- spez 18y agoA "top" link is a link that has been the hottest link on all of reddit at some point. 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.
- greendestiny 18y agoAn interesting comparison would be the last n articles that have been ranked <= 25 for the default sub-reddit mix. At least that would compare the articles a user would see on each frontpage without customization.
- greendestiny 18y agoWell to answer my own question (close enough anyway) the top 10 submitters of the top 500 submissions this week account for 15.2% of articles, for this month its 15.8%
- jules 18y agoWhat's the number for subreddits?
- gaika 18y agoOn jaanix it is the same ~30% for new users (no personalization). 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.
- pierrefar 18y agoThis is really old news. It first broke end of March with this post: http://socialalerter.com/news/digg-got-it-166-wrong http://socialalerter.com/news/digg-got-it-166-wrong 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.
- froo 18y agoHow can it be "old news" when the Recommendation Engine only recently got released?
- pierrefar 18y agoBecause the data has been available for ages. The Recommendation Engine has little to do with going popular - yet. 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.