Digg the rigged? A closer look at Digg's democratic model
Here you have a great post from JesusPhreak referring to the information cascade problem on digg.
Upon checking the frontpage, I immediately noticed a common element in several stories - the yellow nuclear symbol which served as the icon for the #2 ranked Digg user, who goes by the name digitalgopher. This user had 3 of the top 15 stories at the time. Another user had 2 frontpage stories. This isn't something I've ever really noticed before, but it did make me immediately suspicious - getting to the frontpage of Digg isn't the easiest thing in the world. So I decided to look a little closer and see who exactly were digging these frontpage stories submitted by digitalgopher. Turns out that every single one of his stories had a common group of people being the first ones to Digg his story - what made me even more suspicious was the fact that several of the users who were digging all of his stories also had stories of their own on the frontpage. This was very odd. I have heard before that a small group of users tend to get many of the top stories, but I never had considered that they may all be working together to achieve this.
Why are the same exact users among the first 30 to Digg every single story? Why are they all digging each other's stories? How exactly have all of these users ended up in the Digg top 30?
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