Anyone who's spent much time on DK has wondered at times how some diaries zoom right to the Rec List and other, perhaps equally worthy ones, sink immediately into oblivion.
Is it the wisdom of the crowd, or something else at work?
This phenomenon has in fact been studied (in a different context), and reported in a fascinating article.
Bottom line: popularity has very little to do with objective quality, and depends very strongly on the ratings of the first few readers, which are unpredictable and virtually random.
Columbia sociologist Duncan Watts did an on-line experiment where he asked people to download and rate songs by obscure bands.
In the experiment's control group, participants were given no information about how other people rated the songs. In the eight different test groups, people could see how many downloads each song had gotten.
Results? Objective quality (as rated by the control group) had very little to do with a song's performance in the test groups. In any given group, a song in the Top 5 in quality had only a 50% chance of being in the Top 5 in success.
This "success breeds success" effect is amplified on DK because the currently "successful" diaries are shown at the top of the list, while other diaries scroll off in a matter of minutes. It's heavily biased toward a "winner take all" result. Most diaries never even get a fair shot.
Maybe it's just a fact of life. But here's an idea: what if, in addition to the Rec List, there was also a "Random List" that would let the user pick from a group of randomly selected diaries from the last couple of hours? You could recommend them, but you couldn't see how many other people did. If enough people recommended a diary "objectively," it might then appear on the normal Rec List.
Food for thought, IMO.