Recommended Flaw: 31% of Digg Homepage submitted by 10 Users

Post by froo » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 2:56 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #10

froo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

It 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.

Post by ojbyrne » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 3:16 AM UTC

dhotson wrote: post #5

This 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: .. is there anyone from Digg here that can confirm this? :)

Post by Mapou » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 3:29 AM UTC

ojbyrne wrote: post #2

On 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.

Post by ambition » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 4:01 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #4

It 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 ) submitted by the top 10 submitters. Who incidentally are: nickb 77 edw519 34 markbao 26 bdfh42…

    percent of stories on homepage by top 10 
    --------------------------------------------
    percent of stories submitted total by top 10

   percent of stories on homepage by non-top n
   -----------------------------------------------
   percent of stories submitted total by non-top n

Post by froo » Mon, Jul 07, 2008, 4:09 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #14

froo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'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…

Hmm. 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 su…