Nowadays blogs and forums are becoming more and more popular in the Internet. The web, in a way, has taken the course of the popular vote. There are literally millions of websites that serve this purpose, but among the most popular ones is Digg. Digg, as many of us know, is an extremely successful website that posts news and interesting current articles. But you may be asking yourself, what makes this website so special? There are tons of news websites. Well, the idea behind Digg was quite clever, the creators of this website, Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson made use of cascades in order to revolutionize the idea behind this website. They thought out the feature that many viewers would be able to “digg” an article if they were interested. With the purpose of ranking the articles that were digged the most as the highest ranked. An idea that, although extremely simple, changed the way that we think about rankings. Even Google wants to implement this idea on their algorithm for page rank.

If you visit this website you would notice that most of the articles have relatively high rankings, usually above 300. That is because the web page is based on the idea behind cascades, only posting the most popular web articles. Just as we discussed in class, if the majority of the people think article A is interesting, no matter what insight or signal you get (taking into account that the person does not have any information about the article) your best bet is “to go with the crowd” and view article A. Digg is a perfect example of the cascading effect. The main argument behind this is that the person has something at stake, and should choose wisely. In the case of Digg that something at stake is time, each individual that visits the page does not have the time to thoroughly research the articles and comment on them. As a result, people end up, most of the time, viewing the most popular article. I personally visit the website many times a day and I always end up reading about the most digged articles. I rarely find myself looking for an specific article unless I have some prior information about it. I am sure this is the case for the many people that view this website on a daily basis. As discussed in lecture, is the crowd that describes the behavior. The same idea applies for the many websites that make use of this feature.