OPEN

Ian Delaney continues his investigations into the true nature of the Digg community and how news makes its way to the front page (or not).

He seems to be reaching an understanding of the groups of friends on Digg as interest groups. Join a group of like-minded souls on Digg and they become your filter – you trust that network to flag things that are interesting to you (kind of how RSS feeds from bloggers I consider to be part of my network works for me).

Here are some of his latest observations:

• "…the front page of digg actually becomes irrelevant to heavy users. Or
  maybe even a scoreboard for the clans to which they belong."

• "The best links, the ones on the front page, are (a)
  intensely subjective and (b) will represent the interests of the most
  powerful groups. Fortunately, the most powerful groups represent
  interests diverse enough to ensure that population of digg isn’t
  decreasing (though it isn’t growing very fast anymore either)."

• "Being featured on digg is a very temporary boost to ratings that won’t add much
  to your bottom line. People looking for interesting new articles and
  sites do not become regular readers, by and large."

Digg’s really interesting, but one of the reasons that these explanations ring true for me is that I have never found the front page of Digg to be that useful for me.