shmula.com — Can Game Theory be applied to Digg? -- "In graduate school, I played a really fun and revealing game called “The Urn Game.” The game shows very simply the concepts of GroupThink, Conformity, Paradigm Shift, and Information Cascades work."
Sep 9, 2006 View in Crawl 4
cysseroSep 9, 2006
Out of curiosity, what was your last favourite article Digg, a month ago?
vudicarusSep 9, 2006
---damn wrong reply
usherzxSep 9, 2006
@b7illsmithbrilliant idea!"It would be better if a user knew the current number of diggs immediately after he dugg it, this would give the user a sense of immediate gratification while preventing the information cascade."
aramoneSep 9, 2006
FIRST POST!
steelmaverickSep 9, 2006
I feel that Digg can be a game. For example, whenever I post comments I go back to the post to see how many diggs its gotten.Or if someone submits a story its like a game to see if it can get to the front page.
foxgnawsSep 9, 2006
All of this digg navel-gazing has become tiresome.
mk32066Sep 9, 2006
When I read group think, for some reason I tthought of double think.
duketimeSep 9, 2006
I don't know if you (or anybody here) reads reddit, but they have implemented these features (certainly for the reasons stated). They keep track of "karma", but there isn't a page where you can see the "Users With Top Karma" which keeps some of the personal motivation to contribute (your karma), but removes some of the motivation to game the system (there's no official ranking of karma).Additionally, Reddit has a period after submit where they won't show an article's points, so that people don't see that an article is on the rise and instinctively jump into it. Then after some time they show the points so late-comers actually have a metric to find the most interesting articles.One other thing is that they only show link titles (no summary), which is both good and bad. It's good in that it encourages users to click through to articles before they up- or down- vote, but it's bad in that it provides you less information to filter on.I still keep up with Digg, but Reddit's pretty cool too.
duketimeSep 9, 2006
Digg would survive a drop from 4000 submits to 1000, but I think you oversimplify "maturity". As the number of submits has increased so have the number of consumers, all of whose interests vary. If submitters start leaving digg there won't be enough content to interest some of these new consumers who will leave as well (good riddance, you might say, but Digg will hurt for this).I also think you miss the points of the solutions. In your response to solution #1 I assume you mean Diggers have *no* incentive to front-page their story. I don't really think that's true. You still see their name on the story, and there could still be ways to see how active they've been in submitting. As far as solution #2 you miss the point completely. Only digg knows how many diggs or burys a story has and if Digg hid this information it wouldn't necessarily stop circle-digging (they can IRC, email, IM their digg link), but it would stop the issue he talks about, people blindly digging or burying a story because it's already been heavily dugg or buried.