Are Friends Overrated? A Study for the Social News Aggregator Digg.com

The key feature of online social networks (OSN) is the ability of users to become active, make friends and interact via comments, videos or messages with those around them. This social interaction is typically perceived as critical to the proper functioning of these platforms; therefore, a significant share of OSN research in the recent past has investigated the characteristics and importance of these social links, studying the networks’ friendship relations through their topological properties, the structure of the resulting communities and identifying the role and importance of individual members within these net-