5 ms·
Hey 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 t
by froo 18y ago
Hey 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 agoHmm. Ok, I believe the number could be partially due to brokenness. Digg made a big design mistake initially in copying Slashdot too literally, and having stories that make the frontpage start at the top and get pushed down. That causes all sorts of problems. Having stories bubble up from the bottom is much more robust. But even if they did that I bet the percentage of frontpage stories from the top 10 users would surprise most people. 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238290
- froo 18y agoAgreed. I personally think its a great thing that there are a core set of users that keep a site interesting and fresh. 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).