Social Dynamics of Digg

Online social media often highlight content that is highly rated by neighbors in a social network. For the news aggregator Digg, we use a stochastic model to distinguish the effect of the increased visibility from the network from how interesting content is to users. We find a wide range of interest, and distinguish stories primarily of interest to users in the network from those of more general interest to the user community. This distinction helps predict a story's eventual popularity from users' early reactions to the story.