Digg: A Lesson in Freakonomics
This is a follow-up to my earlier posts entitled, Game Theory and Digg and Digg as a Game: Part Deux, which were voted to the Digg front page. I want to spend some time discussing incentives, supply and demand, and voting — inspired by Greg’s and Alex’s comments on the previous two articles and on basic economic principles applied to everyday life, as proposed by those Freakonomics guys (Levitt is a uchicago guy — go Maroons!).
In a recent interview, Kevin Rose claims that he has invented an Algorithm that prevents “gaming” Digg and that incentives or “motivations don’t matter.” In his words,
We have sophisticated anti-gaming processes. We are spending a lot in R & D to prevent gaming. Motivations don’t matter.
What are Incentives?
Incentives, defined, are a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a bad thing. There are generally 3 types of incentives:
- Economic Incentives: These are motivations that cause people to act in their own financial interest.
- Social Incentives: These are actions related to shame or glory.
- Moral Incentives: These are motivations that cause people to act out of conscience or conviction.
Approaching Digg from an economic viewpoint of incentives can be very helpful. Indeed, much of Digg voting behavior can be explained from an incentives and motivations worldview. Opposing Rose, I argue that incentives are everything — Kevin Rose is wrong here.
Voting Behavior and Digg
Why do people vote on Digg? I think it’s fair to say that some vote out of moral obligation — they truly like the article and hence vote as an outward manifestation of their personal tastes and preferences. Some vote out of financial self-interest and social incentives — that is, they submit their own story, knowing that if it is voted to the Digg front page, traffic will come, which may lead to clicked-ads and money and personal fame and glory. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these voting behaviors but, apparently, these same behaviors lead to gaming activities on Digg.
How Do People Game Digg?
There are several ways people Game Digg:
- Write about Digg with a sensationalistic title
- Write about Digg vs Google vs Wikipedia vs Amazon vs x, y, z with a sensationalistic title
- Write about something extreme or controversial
Apparently the crowd goes crazy and the mob follows when the formula is followed above. What does this say about the Digg crowd? Not much. It’s a homogeneous mob — at least that is what it appears to look like. But, the Gaming strategies cited above aren’t what Kevin Rose is trying to prevent. In his words,
Anyone can submit. There are 4000 newly submitted stories daily. We don’t have a problem with people submitting their own stories. It is not up to the person submitting story if it makes it to the front page. It is up to the community if that is something they want to see on the front page.
We know that it requires a much larger pool of people to promote the story to the front page. Regardless of source of story, it has to receive a lot of diggs from the community. It doesn’t matter what the motivation of the submitter is. People are going to make money, when users click through to the stories, they have ads on the pages.
Rose argues here there there is an Invisible Hand on Digg — that is, if the story merits a vote, the community will do so, regardless of the source of submission. An equilibrium is achieved when there are enough vote suppliers and story producers — at the story level.
Gaming Digg — I think what people mean when they use the phrase “gaming Digg” is the type of lobbying that can occur — not the typical non-forceful lobbying such as emailing your friends, requesting them to Digg your article, but the collusive lobbying — the organized collusions or underground lobbying groups. Netscape and Digg understand this voting behavior and have policies against it as described here (Netscape Policy):
For example, if a group of individuals only post links to sites with which they are affiliated (more likely than not profiting from any traffic coming to that site) and only vote and comment on stories with which they are affiliated and all these actions are clearly a coordinated effort to push the stories to the Netscape Homepage, these individuals would clearly be trying to game the system and spamming Netscape with their stories.
This policing of voter behavior is akin to government regulation. What the Invisible Hand would normally handle, we now need policies because of a few colluding voters. Changes in Algorithm, as Rose discusses above, is also a form of policing, though it’s of the automated kind. Policies and Algorithms are two regulatory approaches to fixing the Gaming Problem. Is there a better way?
Turning Digg on its Head
Let’s re-visit the notion of Incentives. Incentives are absolutely the key to fixing any social network and voting mechanisms. I retract what I argued earlier in my Game Theory article — I’ll now propose a much simpler solution to Digg, focusing on incentives.
Currently, there is non-infinite but exceedingly large supply of articles (supply) and votes (demand). Because articles are free, there’s no incentive to be selective with individual votes. One could literally vote on any article. But, what if votes had a price. Imagine a world where there is an exceedingly large numbers of articles (N) and votes also, but the votes are regulated by price, hence the votes made will most likely reflect how people truly feel about the article. Here’s what I mean
Let’s assume that Digg has a micropayment business model, such that every registrant to Digg has to purchase a credit of x dollars and that the voting-payment scheme on Digg (or any site like it — Netscape, Battelle’s SearchMob, etc) had a step pricing model. For x volume of votes it costs $.25, then at the next volume step the votes costs $.20, so on and so on. At the $.25 price point, there will likely be less votes, as demonstrated by D2. At $.10, the demand for votes increases. Basic supply and demand — you all know this model well.
How would this stop Gaming Digg and decrease or eliminate SPAM? Voting behavior will, I predict, dramatically change. People will vote on articles they truly and genuinely find interesting. The days of non-malicious lobbying might be gone; the collusions will probably dissolve. What’s left? I believe there will be fewer votes, but the votes will truly reflect what people like.
Conclusion
Digg is an economy. Votes represent demand and articles represent a non-infinite, but exceedingly large supply of articles. Incentives are important in any economy and explain human behavior very well. Incentives can also control behavior that is less desireable, as can be found on sites like Digg and Netscape. The invisible hand on Digg is crippled — the emphasis on being democratic is misguided, since democracies have problems, as is the case with Digg; because of the problems on Digg, hence, Kevin Rose has implemented regulation in the forms of Algorithms and Policies. But, such regulatory measures, in the long run, do not work. What will work, is to use the notion of incentives to curb undesireable behavior. As a consequence, however, there might be fewer votes, but the votes will truly count. Moreover, this might be another revenue model for sites like Digg, which currently rely on an ad-based model.
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Comments
Are you arguing that the Digg algorithm is like a price control regulation?
I have an Economics degree and cannot follow your Invisible hand reference logic. Invisible hand relates to prices in a market of scarcity. I only have so many dollars in my wallet, but I have an unlimited number of diggs to allocate. I do not have to choose between digging an iPod story or digging a Zoon story the same way I have to choose between paying my mortgage or betting on poker.
The jump to “lets pretend that diggs were scarce” is bad. They are not scarce and could be programatically generated, as could story submissions. Using the deadweight-loss drawing is just plain out of context and poor economics.
It sounds to me that there is a secret merit multiplier that digg uses. I don’t thinkin your analysis that you are allowing for the diversity of ways digg could be used. I could use it for my own bookmarking purposes – in which case I would not be likely to care about building a friends network. I could use it to know what discussions to spawn with friends by looking at what articles they’ve read. There is much merit to this secret sauce.
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That’s all well and good but who is going to pay to vote on articles they like? Short answer: they won’t. All that will be left is those that hope the financial reward from a Digg is greater than then money they had to pay for their account’s vote.
Digg no longer then is an entertaining and diverse array of what’s on the web – it becomes a series of press releases.
People go to Digg to find interesting things to read. The solution is to de-emphasize the Digg front page. Instead of one page there is now a personalized page that recommends the latest and greatest based on what the current user has voted upon. In this way Digg would act as StumbleUpon (but without the annoying requirement of installing a browser toolbar). Users would then also have incentive to do more than browse (not the 1% that create or the 10% that only vote, but the 89% that are estimated to be passive readers). They MUST vote to ensure they have an interesting set of things to read the next time they log in.
Digg would become more valuable for the individual (because results are tailored to them) while becoming less valuable for groups hoping for big traffic (there is no longer the mob blindly lead to whatever site is on the front page).