Yeah, collusion, that makes sense. Suppose we invoke the concept of “Social Convention” — current examples of this are tipping at restaurants: it’s not mandatory, but it’s awfully cheap and sleazy if you do not. But, the truth is, it is Social Convention — it’s not mandatory at all. In fact, the linguistic etymology of the word “Gratuity” is “Gratis” — which means free. Economics imposes upon us Social Conventions that, by not doing, brings shame upon us.

What if we had a Social Convention, such that made collusions shameful. For example, sending an email to your friends and asking them to Digg your post — what if that were viewed as shameful — a public sort of shame — that might prevent collusions — something that would bring public shame to the person asking to be dugg.

Who knows. I think there ought to be Social Conventions for blogging — ones that prevent collusions.

Speaking about your solution:
“To tackle Groupthink, make it truly democratic again ” do not profile Top
Diggers or elevate anybody higher than anyone else. This includes no special
weights on previous digging history, etc. ” level playing ground for
everyone, no monarchies or philosopher-kings.”

That’s a nice point but does not make any sense business wise, for power users
status is a major barrier to similar sites competition. That applies to Digg
and to almost all other “social” application out there. If you’re a good
“editor”, I gotta give something to you to stay, otherwise you may as well go
to Reddit or any other site. In my opinion that’s like selecting and giving a
prize to the people you want to keep. Of course, the criteria you use to select
may be the right ones or the wrong ones, but that totally another story.

p.s.: Txs for solving the math issue! 🙂

I took a slightly different look at the problems facing the digg model and came to a different conclusion – that even without the groupthing behavior, the basic notion of using crowds to filter+vote on story value is flawed. i proposed instead a kind of hierarchy of experts as publicly known elected representatives, and letting crowds do what they do best, DISCOVER stories, rather than vote on them:

http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=5160

I don’t think these are semi-random users voting on semi-random articles. I think groups of users get together and vote on specific articles on Digg.

For one of many examples, some weblogs ask all their readers to Digg every article they publish. They are asking a specific group of readers to promote specific content on Digg.

The voting is not semi-random users voting on semi-random articles. Instead, people can manipulate Digg for their own interests, promoting their own content and driving traffic to themselves.

A possible solution to the problem of collusion on Digg would be to try to ensure that Digg always has semi-random users voting on semi-random articles. But, right now, it does not.

Thanks for your comments.

“I think the main problem is collusion. People vote together because of an externality to the game. People vote together out of self-interest to get valuable traffic to their content.”

I don’t agree. I don’t see the payoff for collusion — put another way, what incentives do people have for colluding? Remember, these are semi-random users voting on semi-random articles (unique URL’s) — how do you collude in an environment where there is a quasi-element of randomness? Now, if the top Digg users colluded — then I think you’re point is very sound and valid. But, I’m assuming that the top Digg users are rational and independent, but the rest of the population behave irrationally. Am I missing something?

And, whether the traffic coming from Digg is valuable, I think that’s debatable.

I’m not sure I agree with it though. In the post, you are arguing that the main problem is an information cascade where people vote based on how other people are voting.

I think the main problem is collusion. People vote together because of an externality to the game. People vote together out of self-interest to get valuable traffic to their content.

In an information cascade, the issue is mostly that information is costly — it takes too much time to read the article — so people look at other people (who they hope got the information) and follow their behavior. In collusion, the issue is that players are making side payments in the game to get favorable outcomes.

Depending on which is correct, you get different solutions. As you suggest in your post, an information cascade could be prevented by making it easier to get information or by denying information about how other people act. Collusion requires detecting and punishing behaviors that look like collusion (e.g. dropping link farms from a web search index) or reducing the benefit people could get if they cheat.