A couple of days ago, I wrote that based on my experiences with Kuro5hin I wouldn't be surprised by small sets of users dominating the content and focus of Digg since it is practically the same kind of site. Duggtrends has a blog post entitled Digg user statisitcs & trends which confirms these suspicions. It states
From our database, for the period of 6/19/2006 9:31:28 PM to 7/30/2006 4:41:34 PM a total of 6013 stories were promoted to front page of these top 10 users contributed 1792 i.e 29.8% top 100 contributed 3324 stories i.e 55.28% (which is again what exactly SEOMOZ reported) This clearly shows the shift from the Kevin Rose reported numbers from 26.8% to 55.28%; top users are contributing more & more to diggAs per Jason Martinez (and Calacanis points in his blog) 60% of Digg’s front page is the top 0.03% users and provides this graph.
It looks like the 1% rule is in full effect. This has always been the nature of online communication from mailing lists and newsgroups to Web-based message boards and social bookmarking sites. Human nature will always shine through at the end.
PS: Has anyone else seen that the Digg REST API has now been documented? Thanks to Michael Brundage for the tip.