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A fake article posted by a bodybuilder was dugg lastnight and made it to the front page of digg within 2 hours. The article was fake and many digg voters saw it, but it still received over 800 digg votes, which brought tens of thousands of eyeballs to the fake site and eventually made the fake poster’s server shut down.
On a bodybuilding site, The fake poster explained how he Gamed Digg. Here are a few excerpts from him and his bodybuilding buddies:
balzizras: And it crashed my forum ;(; Actually it crashed my whole host, their main site is down too. take a look:
http://digg.com/gaming_news/Just_out…to_be_recalled.
Im shocked it actually got there. It’s kinda funny anyway, some of those people are flamming me left and right.
tim1277: lol, even tho everyone on that site is calling BS
balzizras: Yah guess they don’t read before they digg.
Aconrad00: muhuhaha thats awesome. 4/29/06 – 192 @ 13.5% bf. 10/17/06 – 199 @ 12% bf
Xer0Xed: lol, you probably just decreased the value of Sony’s stock by 0.1
balzizras: heh too late, some guy has already sent around 50 huge pics to my gmail account. lol
balzizras: Im glad I could touch so many peoples lives with my lil joke. I can’ stop laughing myself. ‘Cept well, one of em guys tracked down my home address and posted it. ;-[ I’ll prolly wake up to a nerd beating me with a baseball bat.
Xer0Xed: ROFL! They seriously posted it?
Balzizras: yep my full name and addy, dunno where the guy found it..grounds for a law suit. hah.
Balzizras: Yah those nutters are taking it abit to seriously posting my home address. Im probably going to be murdered by some pasty white PlayStation fanboy.
Balzizras: And fyi: I gamed them myself, didn’t even get any people to help me digg it.
Digg has since taken down the link on Digg, but this example points to a fundamental problem with social news sites, which I’ve brought up before in my last discussion on Game Theory and Digg — sites like these are proud of being democratic, yet don’t understand that a pure democracy leads to chaos and disorder in the offline world; in the online world, a pure democracy based on inbound links and similar voting mechanisms lead to a herding mentality, not based on fact, but on an information cascade.
I’ll revisit some of elements of Game Theory and show how it applies to Digg and how it causes the anomalies as demonstrated by the Bodybuilder story above.
The Urn Game
In graduate school, I played a really fun and revealing game called “The Urn Game.” The game shows very simply how the concepts of GroupThink, Conformity, Paradigm Shift, and Information Cascades work. Here are the rules of the game:
There are two indistinguishable urns. Urn “W” has two white balls, one yellow. Urn “Y” has two yellow balls, one white. A proctor will flip a coin to choose an urn. You must guess which urn it is after seeing one ball from the urn AND AFTER HEARING ALL THE GUESSES OF THOSE BEFORE YOU. Your goal is to choose wisely.
In our version of the game, 8 students were called per round (new urn-draw each round). At each turn, draw out a ball without looking at any others and without showing the ball to anyone else. Return the ball to the urn, write your guess on the provided sheet, then give the sheet to the proctor.
Playing this game reveals a few things that are relevant to digg and to all social software:
- GroupThink: This game illustrates how conformity can be rational for individuals, even when they don’t care what others do. The decisions made by others convey some information — that is, rational individuals may ignore their own information.
- Conformity: People in a group often believe and do the same thing as people around them. This leads to an Information Cascade — that is, you do what other people do…etc…For example, if you are eating at a fancy restaurant and don’t know which fork to use, you naturally look to see which fork the first person used, and you use the same one. Then, the third person notices which fork you and the first person used, and he does the same. And so on.
- Paradigm Shift: If wholesale conformity occurs, then voters decisions convey no information — that is, if the first 2 people vote for x and everyone follows the first 2 people regardless of their true feelings about the thing voted for, then 100 votes conveys no more information than the first 2 votes. We can further conclude that even when individuals are rational, the group may not be — that is, a few irrational individuals can swing the behavior of an entire group. These irrational individuals are phenomenally first movers also. In the case of Digg, these are the power users — these users commit to a strategy and are known as top diggers.
A Proposed Way of Thinking about Digg
Digg is the online version of The Urn Game. What I see are power users, typically the first movers, wherein a vote is casted by one of the top diggers, and then a flood of comformity follows — that is, voters follow the first movers, typically the power users, and ignore their own rational feelings about the article being dugg and vote anyway, following the power user’s vote. At a wholesale level, this creates an information cascade, such that the Nth vote conveys no more information than the first 2 votes: Digg is a system that allows the power users to swing the behavior of an entire group, or it is a system that allows blind votes, such that voting is done on items that are either read after the vote is made or not read at all.
Classical Game Theory assumes rational choice, which means that the individual has perfect or approximately complete information. But, when votes are cast on items that go unread or are read after the vote is casts, classical game theory somewhat breaks down. But, Groupthink, Information Cascades, and Paradigm Shifts still occur, as we see in the bodybuilder story above.
Back to the Bodybuilder
The Bodybuilder story isn’t new; it exposes a big problem in all social software that needs to be addressed. There is a fundamental over-trust on social news sites — that is, inbound links become the currency that we have come to trust. But, they can be very untrustworthy, because they are not based on some standard, or social convention that we have come to accept.
A Solution?
A mechanism that enforces trust will help this problem. Ideally, a 3rd party, not based on votes, but a reputation-driven system, that exposes and makes public your trust-worthiness, I think, will solve this problem. Then, of course, this system will no longer make the system totally democratic — the system will more closely resemble the United States government system, which is a Republic, not a complete Democracy.
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