Have you ever wondered why the topics reaching the frontpage of some social networks are very often about the same subject?

When you read the frontpage of reddit, you will notice mostly political and world news articles. Propeller too concentrates on political topics. Digg in its turn, is full of technology news. This is something, every blogger knows and the analysis at SocialMediaTrader proves. But why is that?

I mean there is nothing in the Terms of Use at these social networks, saying that only submissions of a specific genre are required. Everybody is free to submit anything and the wisdom of the crowd, will bring a post up or bury it. But still in a magical way, the posts reaching the front page are not diverse.

In this post I will analyze and visualize the network of the digg users, to show why technology is the favorite topic in Digg.

How relationships define the popularity of a topic

There are 3 requirements for a submission to reach the frontpage of any social network:

1. The quality of content.
2. Who submits the posts.
3. Who are the friends of the submitter.

These are points we are all aware of. When a top user submits a post, he gives it – in a sense – an additional popularity boost. His authoritative figure in the social network, says to the other users, that this particular post is worth their time.

But a point we are sometimes missing out, is that the friends of a top user does not only define the popularity of a post, but sometimes also the popularity of a genre.

Lets take a look at the top users of Digg.

The Digg Example

I decided to study Digg, since it is one of the least diverse social networks. In order to find the reason of this, I took a deep look at the network of the top digg users (according to Chris Finke’s data on digg).

• Step 1. I concentrated on the top 10 Digg users and saw if they were friends with each other.

• Step 2. I selected a random user from the list with a high popular ratio. The user I chose was sepultura, 28th top user with a submission/popularity ratio of 61.1%.

• Step 3. I visualized the data into a network, to see how highly these users were connected.

• Step 4. I collected the most dugg topics of each user the past 30 days.

Click to enlarge

I wanted to see if the top users are mutual friends and therefore view and promote each others submissions.

I also chose a random user with a high ratio, in order to see if he also was befriended with those top users. If so the popularity of his submissions could also rely on his friends.

If the top digg users were all befriended and interested in the same topics, it would actually be the reason for this monotony in subjects.

Visualizing Digg’s top users

The result of the visualization shows that the top 10 digg users are actually mutual friends and are in fact creating a very condence network.

Click to enlarge

• Mklopez (rank:10) is mutually befriended with all the others apart from p9s50W5k4GUD2c6 (!!) (rank 7).

• supernova17 (rank:4) is mutually befriended with 7 others, while msaleem (rank:2), mrbabyman (rank:1) and digitalgopher (rank:5) with 6.

• In fact, when these top users are befriended it is always mutual friendship, with the only exception of CLIFFosakaJAPAN (rank:6), who is a fan of Zaibatsu (rank:3).

• Only aaaz – the 8th top user – is mutually befriended with only 2 other top diggers.

• Sepultura, (rank:28) the random digger with high popularity ratio, was mutually befriended with 5 others: mrbabyman, msaleem, supernova17, zaibatsu and mklopez.

So it seems, that Digg’s top 10 users are mutually befriended and therefore are aware of each others submissions. Sepultura, might not be that popular but his popularity ratio is extremely high (61.1%). Is it a coincidence, that he is mutually befriended with the most connected top diggers?
The next step was to see, what are actually the interests of these users. Not surprisingly, apart from P9 and aaaz, all the other users (including sepultura) have as one of their main interests Technology News.

P9 and aaaz seem to have mostly political interests (second most popular topic of digg) and are actually the least connected of the group. P9 is mutually befriended with 4 top diggers (aaz among them), while aaaz is befriended with only p9 and mklopez (the most connected).

The Conclusion

The information collected show how the top diggers are actually in position of controlling the whole thematology of Digg. They have the same interests and are therefore friends with each other. It is only natural that they also like the same content. There is nothing wrong with that.

The power of the top diggers doesn’t rely on the fact, that they are popular but mostly on the fact that they have formed their own network.

But since their influence is so obvious and Digg isn’t specifically a technology network, I am not surprised that Digg enabled couple of months ago a more strict algorithm for a submission to reach the front page.

 

Image from SocialMediaTrader

I tried to do the same research with StumbleUpon, to see if the top stumblers are also that befriended as in Digg. It is certainly not the case. I suppose that’s why StumbleUpon has a much more diverse range of topics.

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