Last night a story on this blog was submitted to Digg. It was not a particularly noteworthy post, just some observations about site authentication and how it can streamlined, but it was submitted to Digg by a top user (#7) and over the course of the next 24 hours or so accrued a total of 75 diggs. The diggs built up steadily over the most of the time period (at least from when I saw when checking in now and then), but never made the jump to the front page. Interestingly, at the same time that the story was waiting in the Upcoming section, there was another Tech News and an Offbeat News story ahead of it for most of the time. This image, courtesy of the submitter, shows just what happened. Eventually the two other stories made it to the front page, but for some reason this one did not. It is not a big deal, this blog does not generate any income, but I am disappointed in that I was looking forward to seeing how my host (Media Temple) and it's Grid server held up to a Digg, despite some problems they have been experiencing and recent improvements. I'd like to say that the experience taught us all something about the workings of Digg, but I have to admit it only served to confuse me. It seems like since the story was submitted by a top Digg user, probably someone with a lot of friends, each digg is weighted less, so rather than reach the front page at 40 votes or so, it took the Google/Digg Democracy story at least 115 and the 93-year-old Blogger story at least 107. As of right now MrBabyMan has a number of stories with close to 40 diggs waiting to be promoted, so this seems like a logical conclusion to make (under 20 hours there are one at 36, two at 33, two at 25...). A quick look at other top 15 users generally make this seem to be true but it is hard to tell because they have not all been submitting lately. This can currently be observed in the user webtech who at the time of posting has unpromoted stories at 40, 37, 64, and 71, in at row, with the oldest being 20 hours and 33 minutes. Other theories I have heard that have less proof are that Digg penalizes blogs and that negative actions against posts (buried as lame or spam, etc) make them take more diggs to get to the front page. Also it is said that if the same users share a digging pattern (if they have the same friends for instance) it might take more diggs for items to get promoted. At this point this is all hearsay and conjecture (which are kinds of evidence), but it's the best we have. It is definitely interesting to guess and examine just how the system works and while more transparency my help spammers, it would let the users know just how democratic Digg really is.