Update: Digg this Story.
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The NYTimes has a fascinating piece today about how the "rich get richer", or popular media gets more popular. In other words, things rise to the top not because they are better quality than the alternatives, but because people copy what their friends do: a tiny rise in popularity an early stage can mean massive popularity further down the line.
But the theory has much deeper consequences when it comes to the success or failure of startups themselves. We love to think that there's some kind of magic formula for the perfect social site, but the results seem far more random: if you rerun history, it could turn out that a whole different set of startups rise to the top. That's because the first few users influenced the final outcome of those startups, and as soon as one site hits "critical mass", everybody gravitates towards that site. So imagine a world in which Reddit had a few thousand more influential users than Digg: it may have won in the long term. This theory also tells us that Digg will never hit the mainstream: it is so heavily seeded with geeks that it will continue to attract that demographic and alienate non-geeks.
