The genius of Digg

Here's an idea: The genius of Digg is that it packs a simple user action with the maximum social intent. A digg is a single click--about as simple as it gets--and yet it's the central component of the community.

At my Webvisions talk on social information architecture I introduced this graph of user actions (right).

The x-axis is how engaged the user is in performing the action. Leaving a comment, for example, is relatively high engagement while a rating is somewhat lower engagement. The y-axis is the social intent of the action--is it mainly personal or is it participatory?

I didn't put Digg on the first version of this graph, though I did talk about it in the session--Digg is like a laboratory for emergent IA. Here's how I see a digg versus other rating/voting systems:

Unlike most other rating schemes, a digg is explicitly participatory. And in the early days of Digg there was a clear feedback loop present--stories that reached a certain number of diggs would be promoted to the home page. (This is no longer true; Digg has had to make its algorithm more opaque to deal with spam, gamers, etc.)

The basic idea of aggregating the simplest user actions isn't new. I found this passage while re-reading Steven Johnson's Emergence the other day:

Emergent systems can grow unwieldy when their component parts become excessively complicated. Better to build a densely interconnected system with simple elements, and let the more sophisticated behaviour trickle up.

What distinguishes Digg is how it's managed to wrap its identity and community around that one action. It's worth asking how that click--the one where you digg a story--got so loaded with meaning. It's partly design, partly community reinforcement and feedback, and partly a good name.

Somewhere in there is a lesson for a start-ups wanting to harness collective intelligence. (If you're accustomed to more traditional ideas about community, there's also something strange about a group whose identity revolves around pushing a button.)