The Digg Uproar Saga: Mr. Babyman and Blind Digging Cited As Culprits

I was trolling the blogs today and on Ashmadai’s Blog there was an item called “Digg Uproar: Attack on Mr. Babyman and Blind Digging“. I thought the article was a fairly good one for it touched on some of the aspects of a situation on Digg. The most interesting thing about the blog was that it provided data concerning Mr. Babyman’s Stats. What the stats revealed was the following:

1. Mr. Babyman has been on Digg for 992 days.
2. He has managed to give out 108 (rounded up from 107.9688) diggs per day.
3. He has submitted approximately 11 (rounded up from 10.4829) items per day.
4. He has commented on an average of 2 items per day (rounded down from 2.0716).
5. He has performed 182,559 Actions on Digg for an average of 184 actions/day (rounded down from 184.0313).
6. He had 2.88 submittals go popular each day.
7. 209.56 people visited his profile page every day.
8. He made 0.36 Friends per day
9. He gained 11.31 fans per day

These are pretty impressive stats for any person, especially for a person who has a job and family. I put any thoughts I may have had on the subject aside because I first wanted to analyze these numbers for myself. The first thing I did was to opt out of using Ashmadai’s calculations because they were based on a 16 hour day, instead I chose to figure out a more reasonable set of numbers. To begin with I set up the following guidelines to used for my figures:

First: It must be assumed that a member of Digg has to devote as much time as possible to Digg in order to gain the type of stats that Mr. Babyman has achieved.

Second: In order to be fair about things Mr. Babyman has to be taken out of the equation, instead of calling these stats as Mr. Babyman’s stats, we will use his stats for “Any Digger”. If we can do this then we won’t be shaded by such things as whether we do not like the man or whether we think he’s the cat’s meow.

Third: This person, aka “Any Digger”, has to have a full time job and a family. This job is a standard 40 hour a week job, which means that Any Digger is hired for 8 hours/day, with 30 minutes of breaks per day. This means that “Any Digger” has to work 7.5 hours per day.

Fourth: “Any Digger” must use up 1 hour a day to shower, sleep, eat and take care of the basic needs of life.

Fifth: “Any Digger” is allotted 1 hour per day for travel to and from work. This time will include stopping for coffee, getting gasoline for the car, etc. This time does not count for weekends.

Sixth: “Any Digger” must have 6 hours of sleep for each night of the week. This time includes weekends.

Seventh: The person’s weekend runs from 12 AM Saturday to 12 AM Monday morning. This makes the weekend as 48 hours.

The calculation: There are 24 hours in a day, we must start taking out the time that the person has to be away from Digg. I am not going to use the excuse that people can mobile Digg off and on all day long into the figures, nor will I use the time that a person should be working or sitting in class. I am only going to use the numbers above. Let’s calculate how many hours a day this person has to Digg.

Weekdays: 24 hours - 06 hours for sleep = 18 Hours - 7.5 Hours for work = 10.5 hours - 1 hour travel time = 9.5 hours - 1 hour feeding time = 8.5 hours. Final hours per work day is 8.5 hours per work day, or (5 x 8.5 =) 42.5 hours per week, for Digg.

Weekends: 24 hours - 6 Hours sleep = 18 hours - 1 hour cleanup = 17 hours. 2 x 17 = 34 hours.

Totals: 42.5 hours (Weekdays) + 34 Hours (Weekends) = 76.5 Hours/week to devote to Digg. 76.5 hours divided by 7 = 10.93 hours. I will call this 11 hours/day average to evote to Digg, in the interest to being fair and to help make things easier to figure.

Now “Any Digger has 11.0 hours per day (average) to be on Digg, let’s see how it affects the stats:

Diggs - 108 Diggs/day - 10 Diggs/hour - 1 Digg every 6 Minutes.
Submits - 11 Submits/day - 1 Submit/hour - N/a Submits/minute
Comments - 2 Comments/day - 1 Comment every 5.5 hours.
Actions - 184 Actions/day - 17 Actions/hour - 1 action every 3 minutes 32 seconds.

I am not going to be petty enough to worry about shouts, instead I will adjust my final calculation to 1 action every 3 minutes. We already have enough to carry on any reasonable discussion.

Now the question most on our minds is over the issue of whether 1 action every 3 minutes is an acceptable period of time to organically handle a Digg item. Of course it is, if the normal, average person cannot read or scan an average sized news article in 3 minutes and click on the Digg button, then they are dawdling. Remember, this is the average person and some may take 5 minutes, while others may take 1 minute… but overall 3 minutes is more than ample time to Digg a post and read an article or view many videos. It’s definitely enough to read or watch something enough to know whether you like it or not. So that problem is put to rest whether I am agreed with or not.

The next question arises over the issue of whether one can keep this up for 11 hours/day for 992 days straight. The answer is “Sure they can, if that is a high priority with them”. Why couldn’t a person perform such a feat? Is the reason to the question due to the fact that you personally cannot envision yourself doing such a thing and therefore no one can or is the reason because it’s physically impossible to do? Think about it and strive not to let mere numbers overwhelm you.

The fact is that a person does not need scripts or bots to give thousands of Diggs per day and make a hundred submittals. All that is needed is time and the desire to accomplish such feats. Digg has no rules saying that a person has to read what they digg, it does not demand that you have to like what you digg. All they really say to us is “Come and enjoy our site where you can Digg, comment or submit things… but don’t use bots or scripts for we will ban your sorry butt!” Digg does tell us that in order to be popular then we should digg, comment and submit items… but they don’t tell us in the rules or FAQ that we have to do everything.