AMY VERNON still recalls the first time, two years ago, when a story she posted on the social news site Digg became popular. She had promoted a blog post titled “Why Does Tony Almeida Hate America?” that riffed on the villain from “24,” the Fox television series. She watched it jump to Digg’s front page, leading to so many hits on her blog that her server crashed.

“It was a really exciting thing,” says Ms. Vernon. “I got an adrenaline rush.”

That feat took her about six months and required her to vote in favor of 100 to 200 online stories a day. Eventually, she gave enough thumbs-up to entries of other avid Diggers that they began promoting hers. “It’s just something I did all day long,” says Ms. Vernon, who was then working as a journalist but is now a social media marketer.

Social Blade, a site that tracks social media, says Ms. Vernon is now the top female Digger, and ranks her No. 15 in an elite group that is informally known as the Power Diggers. The metrics of rising to the top on Digg are forbidding: before the site’s latest redesign in August, some 20,000 stories, on average, were submitted daily and fewer than 200 of those made it to Digg’s front page.

Digg pursued a redesign because Power Diggers had come to wield such an inordinate influence on the ranking of stories that new visitors to Digg usually found their submissions all but forgotten  sometimes making the site feel like a members-only club, rather than the communal product of unfettered crowdsourcing.