Quantifying the influence in social media
There’s a great article over at NYTimes which discusses a phenomenon called “cumulative advantage” or “power law distribution”. In the simplest of terms, it says that people tend to gravitate to things which they perceive as popular, regardless of their intrinsic qualities.
Matthew Ingram applies the theory to Digg, an obvious example of this theory. Articles that gain in popularity - quantified by diggs on Digg - be it by virtue or by chance, tend to get dugg more by other users. Now, this is not in any way a new theory, but this is the first time I’ve seen it applied to Digg. Here’s an important quote from the NYtimes story:
“What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market “wantsâ€? at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history: there is no sense in which it simply “revealsâ€? what people wanted all along.â€?”
Which leads us to my convoluted title. In essence, this means that the sentence “well, maybe it sucks, but that’s what people want” makes no sense. It means that people want what people want, and if they don’t know what they want they’ll just look at the person next to them and copy their homework.
This is interesting by itself, but it becomes very, very interesting when applied not only to Digg, but also to social media, the blogosphere and the state of the Internet today; so interesting that someone should probably do proper research and write a book about it. Mainstream media has authority, so one can at least base his/her trust on something. But on MySpace, where does the authority come from? That’s right, the number of comments. On Digg it’s the number of diggs. On some other social networks, like certain IRC channels or forums it’s a weird and hardly understandable net of connections, history, chat logs and whoknowswhatelse.
Looking at all this through the prism of cumulative advantage, it’s easy to see that much of what is popular on social networks is rubbish. And it’s becoming harder and harder to discern what is what. Is Tila Tequila worth my time? Who knows. Maybe she’s a brilliant social networker. Maybe she’s very hot. Maybe she writes great stuff on her blog. And maybe it was just pure chance that anyone knows her name today.
The Digg example is particularly interesting. There, we have something what I’ll call a “streamlined cumulative advantage“. This means that Digg, by the means of their algorithms (for an in-depth view into a life cycle of a Digg story click here) is actually helping stories with more votes to reach a broader audience, as if they’re trying to make them focus on what’s important. However, this multiplies the cumulative advantage effect, which in turns means that the stories we might be getting on Digg’s front page are largely random.
Well, not completely random. A completely uninteresting title and story will never reach the front page. But, within a certain scope of topics, and within a certain range of intelligence/novelty in the title story and content, it’s safe to say that some of the stories will go to the front page solely due to cumulative advantage, and not because the Digg community really thinks they’re more interesting than others.
All this makes for an interesting question. If Digg would remove the digg count from the stories - not the voting system, just the number of votes - would the quality of the stories on the front page increase? If diggers were forced to vote based only on the story’s title, description, and content, would they take more time to think if the story is really worth their vote?
I think there might be something to it. What’s your opinion?
April 16th, 2007 at 7:02 am
“If Digg would remove the digg count from the stories”
then the main user base that has made digg what it is will leave, hopefully not gravitate towards netscape, and find another medium to express what the majority are supposed to like.
April 16th, 2007 at 7:15 am
The long-term flaw of Digg is that its headline content sucks. Sort of an adolescent, popularity contest vs great, quality content of value. In its current state of evolution, I’d classify it as frivolous, borderline silly.
Casey
editor
www.dailygalaxy.com
April 16th, 2007 at 7:44 am
I don’t believe there is any such thing as “intrinsic” value.
Everyone has their own personal value scales.
-One person may love a story.
-Another may like it a little.
-And yet another may totally hate it.
Which one signifies the “intrinsic” value?
There is no such thing.
April 16th, 2007 at 7:55 am
@Chris: you have a point, but I can’t completely agree with you. For example, novelty is intrinsic value. If Microsoft goes bankrupt, and NYTimes breaks the news, this news item obviously has a certain intrinsic value. Definitely more than a blog story with a picture of a cute cat which has been stolen from another blog which in turn stole it from Flickr.
Of course, someone may like a picture of a cute cat better, and Digg is defined neither as a news site nor a site about cute cats. On a completely relative scale, anything goes. But Digg has started as a tech news site, so it should care about the news about Microsoft going bankrupt.
Or, to skip the semantics, let’s talk about journalistic value. As an editor, my job is to judge which news items are worthy of publishing. It’s obvious that old news are worthless to me. So, if Digg is in any way trying to be a site that brings you news, then the items which are actually new have more value than old ones.
@Ali: people said that when they removed the top user list, too.
@Casey: much of it is silly, but Digg’s system allows for many news items to reach the front page daily, and Digg is still quite good at bringing tech news. But it is going down, I agree.
April 16th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
I’ve changed the title to make it more on topic; besides, the original title made less sense the more I looked at it.
April 18th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Interesting to read… I think this cumulative advantage theory is very true: removing the digg count from the stories would have a big impact. Currently the most popular stories get even more popular, and the least popular songs are almost ignored. The actual intrinsic qualities is no real factor it seems.
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