Chris Winfield from 10e20 wrote an interesting article yesterday on how to become a top Digg user without doing anything shady. The purpose of the article is to teach you how to become a top user so you can increase your odds of promoting stories to the homepage. As a top Digg user, I feel that the most people don’t understand the difference between a top Digg user and a normal user.
As a top Digg user you usually have hundreds of users who “friended” you, thus many of them vote blindly on your submissions. Because of this it is easier for top users to get more votes, but this doesn’t really make it easier for a top user to get stories promoted to the homepage. Digg’s algorithm takes votes from friends into account which is why many of the top users require more votes before their submissions hit the homepage, while normal users require a lot less votes. I have experienced a few cases where I submit a story and a normal user submits the same story from a different source and gets to the homepage before me. The submission titles and the descriptions were very similar, but the submission from the user with 0 friends reached the homepage first.
A few months ago Digg did not behave like this and it was really easy for top users to get stories to the homepage. Digg is evolving their algorithm and as time goes on they will probably try to make it equally difficult for top users and normal users to promote stories to the homepage.
