It has been said that on social media sites such as Digg the rule of 80-19-1 describes what percentage of users consume, participate, and contribute actively to the community. Eighty percent of the users are just passive consumers, they just visit the site to get the latest news or links. Nineteen percent of users actually participate in the community. However, it is just one percent of users that do most of the contribution of the content that gets consumed.
Rand at SEOmoz wrote a little while back about the phenomena of top users having a disproportionate amount of influence. I believe the influence and power that these top users have is merited. It takes a lot of work to become one of these top users and they deserve to have the power they have. I speak from experience. Although I am not a top 20 or even top 100 user on Digg (at least not yet) I have recently made into the elite group of the top 1,000 users (number 711 as of this writing to be exact), and with a few stories near the homepage right now I should be in the 300 to 400 range by weeks end. So if we assume that there are at least 71,100 users at Digg, which I think is very likely, I am one of the top 1 percent.
