An analysis of Social News Websites

Social News Websites (SNW), such as Digg and Reddit, are a new type of on-line news aggregator where an arti- cle’s visibility (e.g. its position) is determined “democrati- cally” by the users’ preferences (usually by vote). We offer an overview of SNWs in both generic and specific terms, as well as some common venues for variation. Finally we present two main results observed by continuously monitor- ing a Reddit and two more SNWs across a few days. First we observed a strongly cyclical variation in the site’s activity and find that this affects the proportion of articles submit- ted at different time of the day/week that reaches the front page. Second we consider the problem of participation in- equality and study the distribution of authorship, finding it consistent with Zipf’s law.