digglogoMore growing pains for Digg, as game theory and social psychology catch up to the popular user-generated news site.

In some ways, Digg functions as a microcosm of the Internet as a whole (in others, not - and we’ll discuss that later). So it’s instructive to compare what’s going on there with the rest of the Internet, and the battle for A-list status and the Power Law.

Digg users vote new stories up or down, and stories with a lot of Diggs get promoted to the home page (usually). There can be great benefits to having a story Dugg - if your company or blog is mentioned, you’ll get a tremendous amount of traffic and potentially money.

At the same time, there’s a social reward to being a top Digger. The more stories that you submit that rise to the top, the greater your social standing.

Naturally people found a way to game the system. Or did they?

Allegedly, groups of people got together to Digg each others’ stories up, so that in the end small groups of people controlled what appeared on the Digg home page. Even if someone else submitted a story, one of the Diggerati might resubmit it as a dupe, and let his or her friends know to Digg this version instead.

It was bound to happen. There was enough incentive (tangible or not) for stories to get to the home page that people were going to find a way to subvert the ‘one person, one vote’ rule that Digg was founded on.

Now Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, has changed the behind-the-scenes algorithms that determine whether a story gets promoted or not, and the top Diggers are angry. They’ve worked hard to get where they are, they argue, and they’ve contributed time and effort to the site. Why shouldn’t they be rewarded?

And so we come to Shirky’s Power Law: “In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome.”

In the blogosphere and the Internet in general, there are no mechanisms that act against this. It’s a way of life. In Digg, Kevin Rose seems to be trying to fight against the natural Power Law that has created the top Diggers…and now the animosity they’re launching in his direction.

He’s in a real bind. To ‘democratize’ Digg, he’s got to risk driving the Diggers away who made Digg what it is today. But to keep on the way Digg has, it will end up being insular and supporting a very small group of A-Diggers, and will eventually drive away those who want to contribute actively, but aren’t part of the inner circle.

Is there a solution? After the fact, no. Part of what made the Power Law so effective on Digg was the star system that rewarded top Diggers. If that element had been removed at the beginning, personalities would be less involved and there would be less reason to game the system.

As it stands, Rose is fighting a losing battle: Either alienate the current top Diggers, and a new batch will flourish. Or, pay them to become editors, like Jason Calacanis and Netscape.

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