Bulldozer buryThere are always barriers to communication, whether it?s in a public forum or a private conversation. Short of telepathy unfiltered by flesh or culture, something, or someone, will always hinder the ability to communicate. However, sometime other people try to hide, change, or block the message. Here?s a case for you to ponder, a real example from yesterday. Be warned, this is a longish article and might only be interesting to those people who are intrigued by the mechanics of social media and social news sites in particular.

MECHANICS OF A SOCIAL NEWS SITE

Social media, including social news sites like Digg, are a way to communicate with other people. The ostensible purpose for submitting stories to Digg is to tell the world, ?I think this story is important and I think other people will, too.? Granted, social news submissions often have a second message, namely, ?You should look at this because I?m cool/smart/interesting.? Finally, a third motivation for submitting to social sites is for material gain of some kind, which is normally contrary to the User Agreement or Terms of Service of any social media site.

Feedback is the most important function in any social media site. It gives other users the chance to voice their opinion about the submission. Here are common uses for feedback in social media:

  • To start or continue a conversation, normally through comments
  • To express approval of the submission (a Digg, up vote, etc.)
  • To express disapproval of the submission (a Bury, down vote, etc.)

Social media sites often have underlying rules or algorithms that control the ranking of a story in their systems. Higher ranking generally leads to higher visibility. Lower ranking leads to lower visibility and, eventually, removal or invisibility. The rules that control ranking and visibility are normally kept secret, but dedicated individuals normally figure out how to work the rules to their advantage.

TODAY?S EXAMPLE

Digg submission

??You can see a more up-to-date version of the story here.

The submission was a ten question interview, conducted by E-mail, with a top Digger. It?s debatable whether or not the interview was newsworthy, but 98 people seemed to like the story.

As you can see, this story got 98 ?Diggs?, or votes of approval (and thank you, everyone, for voting!). This number of votes is sometimes sufficient to promote a story to the front page of Digg, although timing is an issue: things generally seem to get promoted faster depending on how quickly the Diggs are recorded.

I personally saw this story appear as a Hot News in Offbeat several times, although I never saw it get promoted Hot News in all topics (usually a good indicator that a story will become Popular). At any rate, it was doing well for awhile.

Now let?s check out the Ajaxonomy Bury Recorder data. This website tracks information about when a story is Buried, the reasons for Burial, and the number of times it happened. The Bury function acts as a negative vote to reduce the visibility of the story. If sufficient ?Buries? occur, depending on several factors which I don?t completely understand, a story will disappear from the Upcoming lists. This means that there is virtually no chance that the story will become popular.

Ajax Bury Data

EDIT:? here is a smaller version, don’t know if it will be legible:

?Ajax Bury Data

I have to admit that I was surprised by the number of Buries that hit this story. The reason codes that Digg provides are not terribly useful, particularly the ?general? reason.

THOUGHTS

It seems to me that there were two campaigns at work here:

1. A mini-campaign to promote the story (initiated by me, of course)
2. A mini-campaign to bury the story (initiated by at least one anonymous individual)

Why do I think there was a mini-campaign to bury the story?

I deduce that several individuals acted together to remove the story from Digg, because 6 buries occurred within 5 minutes of each other. These 6 buries deviated significantly from the timing and intervals of the other 8 buries. While it is certainly possible that six people independently decided to bury the story within five minutes of each other (it?s only possible for one person to bury a story once WITH THE SAME ACCOUNT), it seems a bit unlikely to me that this activity occurred completely randomly.

It?s possible that everything happened completely by chance. It?s possible that the story really wasn?t Digg-worthy. Heck, maybe the fabled ?Digg auto bury? feature really does exist. I don?t know.

What I do know, assuming that all things are equal, is that up to that point in time:

  • 87 people Dugg the story
  • 8 people ?buried? the story, then 6 more came along to completely put it out of the running (total of 14 people)
  • 11 more people Dugg the story afterward (and?3 more did as I was writing this post)

CONCLUSION

I think this Digg story provides an interesting parallel with communication in real life:

  • Person A has an idea and puts it into the public view
  • Person A recruits friends and allies to promote the idea
  • A cross-section of supporters and other individuals (87 of them) promoted the idea before the concentrated effort to ?bury? occurred
  • Other persons tried to remove the idea from public view (either a Person B leading a mini-campaign, a series of unconnected individuals, or some combination of the two)
  • The rules of engagement were incomplete or unclear, otherwise we could understand what happened much better
  • It?s unclear who had the most influence given the lack of transparency
  • Without further concrete information to disprove any theories, it seems that a minority of individuals suppressed a story that a larger number of people approved of.

I know that this scenario is probably more complicated than it looks and I?m missing a lot of concrete data to support these conclusions, but it?s about all that one can conclude at this point. Also, it?s one example, not rigorously studied and analyzed, so it?s probably not conclusive.

I will suggest, however, that these key points apply to many types of social media campaigns. The actual players, rules, domains, and events will differ at a detailed level in any social media campaign. However, this case study seems to indicate that different individuals or forces have different strengths or influence at different times. Sometimes Person A will succeed and gain widespread acceptance of their message. Other times the ability to transmit the message will be greatly dampened, to the point where few if any additional people will find out about it.

FINAL WORDS

Although I?m not happy with the outcome of this particular exercise, I don?t bear any ill will towards anyone. In the contrary, this exercise has given me (and hopefully you) some interesting and helpful information to apply to social media sites.

So thank you, Buriers. Your actions have helped me to learn something and I?m attempting to pass it on to a few other people. We are in your debt.

EDIT: as always, I’d love to know what other people think.

P.S.? I did get over 1,000 views through StumbleUpon, so that’s encouraging.


If you're new here, welcome! Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed to stay up to date with my latest posts and articles. Thanks for visiting!

Other posts that you might enjoy reading: