Several people have written blog postings about digg and information cascades, mostly painting them in a good light. Well, Muhammad Saleem disagrees in his blog, The Mu Life, located at http://themulife.com/?p=145. He believes that digg relies heavily on the concept of the wisdom of crowds, which means that under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision. Now, if we look at digg’s description, it is “a user driven social content website where everything is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see. “ Saleem notices that digg relies heavily on the wisdom of crowds idea.

While others talk of information cascades as helping digg, it seems that this was not digg’s intention. According to Saleem, digg’s system relies on users making decisions based on what they think, but they are actually making decisions based on what the user’s who read the stories before them think (and equal access to all stories is not given, since stories ranked highly by previous readers are given higher visibility). This is, according to Saleem, when the wisdom of crowds fails and herdlike behavior takes over.

Saleem ends the discussion by making a connection to The Tipping Point. Since, according to The Tipping Point, cascades move along social ties, digg has taken steps to undermine its friends feature. Removing social ties between readers would help get rid of the information cascade problem since stories should only be promoted when a certain number of random people digg it.