Student Paper: Digg.com: An Analysis of the Motivating Factors Behind Voting

Generally speaking, in the public affairs domain, people tend to have a "free-riding" mentality and adopt an indifferent and rationally "ignorant" attitude towards voting. However, the website digg.com seems to break this characteristic, as there are always a large number of users participating in voting. This article starts with Downs' "benefit-cost" model of voting to analyze the driving factors behind the voting activities of users on the digg website. It is believed that it reduces costs overall, and due to the additivity of voting effects and the intuitiveness of diggspy, the expected benefits of voting have greatly increased, and the probability of gaining profits has also been enhanced, thus giving users the motivation to vote. Of course, the article also analyzes the negative constraining factors from the perspective of users' group strategies.

(Yizhenglin, School of Journalism, Renmin University of China)