http://arxiv.org/abs/0904.0016 Fans, the law of web surfing and users' interests combine to promote and rate stories on Digg. We describe a general stochastic processes-based approach to modeling user-contributory web sites, where users create, rate and share content. These models describe aggregate measures of activity and how they arise from simple models of individual users. This approach provides a tractable method to understand user activity on the web site and how this activity depends on web site design choices, especially the choice of what information about other users' behaviors is shown to each user. We illustrate this modeling approach in the context of user-created content on the news rating site Digg. (In Proc. of the 3rd Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media) Tad Hogg and Kristina Lerman 2009-04-02 00:39:00 ICWSM digg social media social networks online content popularity