

Recommended Flaw: 31% of Digg Homepage submitted by 10 Users - ajbatac
http://popfail.com/technology/recommended-flaw-31-of-digg-homepage-submitted-by-10-users/

======
pg
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   20
      nreece   19
      ajbatac  18
      wumi     17
      prakash  16
      smanek   16
      ilamont  15

~~~
ambition
To me the percentage itself isn't surprising but the ratio

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

might be interesting, especially compared with

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

It would reveal if top submitters are just submitting more stories, or if
they're submitting better stories.

~~~
smanek
very true - that would be enlightening.

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

------
spez
Over the last week, 6% of the top stories were submitted by top-10 users on
reddit.

~~~
ivankirigin
What 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
A "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
An 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
Well 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%

------
aswanson
Nothing new: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law>

~~~
bdotdub
yup, nothing new. That might even be a good percentage :)
<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html>

------
wallflower
Related 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>

------
pierrefar
This is really old news. It first broke end of March with this post:
<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
How can it be "old news" when the Recommendation Engine only recently got
released?

~~~
pierrefar
Because 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.

------
dhotson
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: <1%

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

~~~
ojbyrne
You 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.

------
ojbyrne
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.

------
gaika
On 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.

