>"I hope this article can help those normal diggers understand just how it is the power users got that way, and why digg is not a democracy"<p>Actually, it sounds like Digg is exactly a democracy to me. You have as much chance making the front page of Digg (or a popular subreddit) as you do getting your preferred policies enacted by the government - essentially zero. Having your voice heard in a crowd of millions is hard. Those that succeed usually hack the system.<p>The position that there is no conflict between competing interests in a democracy because "everybody has a voice" is BS (not that I would expect such arguments from this crowd). You can ask my sister who was outvoted for 18 years by my brother and I, the Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, or the Republicans in DC about how great a job democracy does of balancing competing interests.
Extremely intresting article on how digg users have managed to bend the algorithm to their whims. I wonder if any social news site is really immune to this.
classic example of how democracy turns into an in-group oligarchy. there is no way to engineer a democracy so that certain people will not wield disproportionate power.<p>this is a problem, for government to be effective responsibility and power must be equal. since democracy always ultimately ties responsibility back to the masses there is no accountability.<p>notice how in this example, just as with political democracy, power is wielded through framing what people vote on and not controlling the votes directly. the in-group does not actively prevent any story from reaching the top. but engineer the system in such a way that it is phenomenally unlikely for out-groups to get their content noticed, regardless of merit.
if only there were a place where posting a story instantly puts it on the front page at least briefly, and where people actually vote for submissions because they're good, not just so that the submitter will reciprocate.
It would be an added bonus if the comments weren't filled with mindless drivel.
But that's clearly a utopia that could <i>never</i> exist.
This is a very insightful article, and I'm impressed with how much work the author put into getting something onto the front page of digg. If I were looking for somebody to do effective online PR, I'd be looking for somebody like this.<p>I think it's somewhat sad that digg is so huge now that it takes so much effort to get people to pay attention to an interesting link, and I'd be interesting in seeing if there were any way to counteract the user fragmentation that occurs as a social news site gets popular. Reddit-like categories seem to be one solution, but it seems more like a band-aid than a total solution.
<i>26,000 diggs in two months should have meant, $13k right</i> </quote><p>It is about one digg per minute working full-time (8 hours a day) for two months straight!<p><pre><code> 26 000 / ((2 months) / ((24 hours) / (8 hours))) = 0.889820511 minutes^(-1)
</code></pre>
google calculator: <a href="http://is.gd/dnFp" rel="nofollow">http://is.gd/dnFp</a>
Are any of you guys practicing mutual upvoting with friends here, on Hacker News?<p>I suppose it happens naturally to some extent. These voting patterns and the amount to which they happen naturally should be statistically visible for pg if he is actively looking for them.
I guess there is a lot to learn from this article which goes way beyond digg to the internet in general and maybe AI and also probably the genetic coding which we see happening and will see much more in the future.<p>What this article tells me is rather simple and important. Programms do what they are told to do. There is no human element to reason nor decidions being made, it is simply fucntions, orders which are very very predictable.<p>Knowledge is power of course and no one ought to have power which is why I believe that the author's cause seems noble, namely sharing your kowledge. But it really goes to the heart of the matter as far as the internet is concerned.<p>Everything is a program and programms follow orders therefore every programm can be manipulated whether directly or inderectly to achive the desired maybe mal intentioned results.<p>Hence will there ever be a proper democracy, a unity of people, a place where the market forces do not manipulate the good intentions of the users?<p>Will there ever be a place where the people in general can share with each other deserving articles, unifluenced by other motivations or bias, but the simple desire to share worthy kowledge, I presume with the aim of advancing civilisation itself and educating felow human beings?<p>The answer seems to lie not with the internet where robots (algorithms) follow orders but with the humans themselves who are imensly much more complex and driven by many varieties of purposes.