Call them memediggers, community moderated news sites, or digg clones. User submitted news moderated up or down by other users and available for comments. Call them whatever you wish, this new class of social media warrants close examination in order to make the most of the potential it presents. Which of these sites get the most use, see the most conversation and are most useful to their readers? How should people looking to launch new digg-style sites organize things in order to maximize adoption and impact?

One first step could be to examine a variety of leading sites of this type and that is what I've done below. It's arbitrary, it's unscientific and I think it's interesting. Last Friday evening I looked at the front page of 4 interesting memedigger sites and wrote down some numbers. Digg is clearly the standard, but also examined below are Reddit, the Spanish-language site Meneame and Hugg.com, a project of the hugely popular environmental blog Treehugger. I would have liked to include Newsvine, but was unable to find numbers to compare.

An overview of some observations:

• Front page items are more commented on in Reddit than Digg, relative to the number of points those items have recieved.
• Meneame seems to be successful in terms of votes but receives fewer comments.
• Hugg isn't being used very much. I am curious why.

For each site I counted:

• the total number of points listed for all items on the front page of the site
• the number of items listed
• the age of the oldest and second oldest items on the front page
• the total number of comments listed on the front page
• the estimated number of registered users in the system

Based on those numbers I then:

• divided the average number of points held by each item on the front page of each service by the estimated number of registered users. This could be called the chance that any single item on the front page was given a point by any single registered users. This may serve to roughly estimate the breadth of participation in the system - a system where the items on the front page have received a relatively large number of votes relative to a relatively small number of users is one where there is greater agreement amongst users about what is important. This number may be more precise if it were calculated with the number of recently active users than total registered users.
• I did the same division as above with the number of comments listed. This may provide some insight into the amount of conversation that occurs on the various sites, at least regarding the items that are on the front page.

Obviously this is very unscientific, just a starting point to look at and talk about the differences in memedigger services and communities. I hope you find it interesting.

Four memediggers compared

Digg

6923 points on 15 items = 461 points per item on the front page

Oldest item listed is from 1 day 3 hours ago, 2nd oldest 21 hours ago.

832 comments = 55 comments per item on the front page.

There appears to be 178,625 total registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users equals 0.04. That could mean that one out of roughly every 20 registered users has given a point to an item that is now on the front page.

Total comments divided by registered users equals 0.005. That could mean that one out of roughly every 200 registered users has left a comment on an item that is now on the front page.

Notes on Digg:

• There are 5955 pages of users. Users Thuglife and Diggitydank both appear after the 1000th page of most active users, in case you were wondering.
• The nearly 180,000 registered digg users is a far larger number than the 60,000 subscribers to Tech Crunch, lest you use the latter number to measure the impact of Web 2.0.
• Google search for site:http://digg.com/users has aprox 4 to 5 million results.

Reddit

3179 points on 25 items front page = 211 points per item

There are several items listed as from 1 day ago.

777 comments = 51 comments per item

Registered users appears to be undisclosed. Reddit representative has said that the site gets tens of thousands of users every day. Google search for site:http://reddit.com/user gets 209,000 results.

Note: Reddit has many additional features beyond news moderation.

Meneame, Spanish-language digg clone on tech

1882 points on 20 items = 94 points per item

Oldest post is 1 day and 10 hours, second oldest 1 day 5 hours.

192 comments on 20 items = 10 comments per item

There appears to be 4940 registered users.

Total points divided by total users = 0.38 That could mean that there is a roughly 40% chance that any single user has given a point to any item that is now on the front page. This could also mean that a high percentage of registered users continue to engage in ongoing use.

Total comments divided by total users = 0.04 That could mean that approximately 1 out of every 20 users have commented on a front page item.

Notes on Meneame:

Google site:http://meneame.net/user.php gets 22,000 results.

There were items with zero and 1 comment on the front page, both with more than 80 votes.

The site also includes a wiki for discussion of the service.

Hugg

92 points on 15 items = 6 comments per post on front page

Oldest item is from 1 day 3 hrs ago, 16 hrs is second oldest.

8 comments on front page.

There are 93 registered users.

Total points on front page divided by total users = .99 That could mean that every user has given a point to an item on the front page. The fact that this is unlikely demonstrates the inadequacy of this formula. I believe it indicates instead that the many of the relatively few active users find almost every item they give a point to appearing on the front page. Clearly the front page is of far less use to these readers than in other systems.

Total front page comments divided by total users = 0.09 That could mean that 1 in ten users have left a comment on an item on the front page. It is likely one or a few users have left more than one of the 8 comments.

Notes on Hugg:

Hugg is a project of the environmental blog Treehugger, for which Technorati has found 9,298 links from 2,943 sites. This indicates that the large Treehugger community is not into Hugg.

Of the 15 items on the front page, all were contributed by a total of 5 users.

One of the items on the front page when I visited was titled Jesus 'healed using cannabis'. I found that funny.

There are loads of big ads on Hugg, including from some of the biggest environmental organizations in the US.

Other memedigger or community moderated news sites that may be of interest:

Muti "Muti is a site inspired by Digg and reddit but dedicated to content of interest to Southern Africans or those interested in Southern Africa." See also the site's cool mashup of Google Maps and Yahoo News on Africa and elsewhere.

Crispynews Crispynews is hosted digg-clone software used by a wide variety of communities of interest. American Idol fans, Mormons, Brazillian hip-hop fans, etc.