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120 Comments
- joe90210, on 10/12/2007, -41/+259hopefully we'll get less stories about what steve jobs had for lunch that day and what new product apple might be thinking of possibly testing to maybe sell in the future
- felchdonkey, on 10/12/2007, -11/+70StoneCypher -
From your profile, it looks like you've only submitted one story that ever got 100 diggs, and you're right, it's not on the home page, but "none of my 100+ digg posts ever have" isn't exactly accurate.
You mean "I once posted a story that eventually got 100 diggs, but it didn't end up on the front page."
Digg's algorithm looks at time of day, overall number of people on the site, how quickly a story is being dugg, and possibly some other factors. Your story could have been submitted at a very heavy time, or perhaps the 100 diggs didn't happen quickly enough - did they take several days to occur?
There's no conspiracy of "insiders," just an algorithm that sometimes disappoints people when they don't get to see their name on the front page. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+45You are exactly right. The problem with digg is that just for the Technology section alone, there are 101 pages of upcoming items with an average of 1500 total items in the queue.
The second your item hits page 3 of the upcoming items with less than 15-20 diggs, your article is pretty much doomed, unless it gets dugg by one of the "popular" people.
I've monitored my server logs throughout the day on a story that was submitted, and on average I will receive Only 1-2 hits from Digg once the article has passed page 2 of upcoming.
That is what leads to people using the friend system to find articles to digg. It's much easier to digg the cool articles your friend already found than it is to wade through 101 pages of mostly crap.
What would be useful is a separate Upcoming page that shows random items from the queue, which would end the nonsense of navigating to the middle section for the average user, and would ensure that quality articles get a chance to be seen by at least somebody. - felchdonkey, on 10/12/2007, -2/+34@stonecypher (again)
Sorry, I was wrong in my earlier comment. I thought the one and only story you had with 100 diggs might have missed the front page because of something with the algorithm.
If you check, you'll see that it was buried by the digg community. That's why it's not a front page story. It was probably buried as spam, since your story was a link to your own blog. - kLacK, on 10/12/2007, -0/+32Its still easy to game digg, for example:
http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Digg_releases_a_new_algorithm?cdigg=3663594#c3663594 - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -7/+39The front page for the NEW AND IMPROVED digg is going to be all aaaz, curtissthompson, and webtickle, all the time baby!
- biffsputnik, on 10/12/2007, -4/+32Exactly.
And, with discouraged Diggers, guess what, even fewer people will put the time in to digg through upcoming. The thing about friends is, it allows solid diggers to develop a 'readership' of sorts. If you digg story after story by a particular user, you may want to add that person as a friend. I digg through my friends list and also upcoming, etc, but I digg a higher percentage of my friends' stories than in spy/upcoming.
The reason is not a scam, or gaming, its because there are a lot of submitters who frankly, don't have it.. or are spamming, submitting inaccurate, sensational, front-page-prayer stories. My friends list is made up of people who submit (usually) good quality material, summarized well and capped with a decent headline. In short, worthy of diggs.
Even if a story might not be of interest to me, I will digg it if I think it would be of interest to others and is quality material. Some disagree with this, but I think it is necessary to overcome the quagmire of the Not-Newest-Stories-But-Not-Yet-Most-Popular. From there, the larger community who doesn't digg as deep will decide. - TheWalkingDude, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23I could be wrong, but I think they also added video thumbnail previews for Dailymotion Videos (like they did for YouTube and Google Video). I'm not sure how I feel about it taking more diggs to reach the front page. I like the idea of better content, but as a submitter I think my odds of getting on the front page just went down (bummer). I also wonder how this will affect people's digging habits. Will more people start checking Upcoming Stories/Show Most Popular? Will the people who used to check that section no longer digg as deep into the queue?
Of the few stories I've gotten on the front page it seems like they had to gather a decent amount of diggs right out of the gate (before they disappear into the depths of Upcoming Stories/Show Newest Stories), then they slowly gather more as people found them in the Upcoming Most Popular section. I fear that now they may be lost somewhere in the middle with only the most hardcore diggers finding them. People are concerned about friends digging friends, but checking your friend's submitted stories is one of the best ways for finding the articles you will like amidst the mountains of submissions. Sort of a paradox. - SpacemanSpiff, on 10/12/2007, -4/+19Does this guy work for Digg? If not, what's his source?
- Scottish, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16You forgot the Kevin Rose Brown Nose Army.
Hey, that rhymes. - djscooterb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12Personally, I think we could improve the whole thing by eliminating who gets "credit" for a submitted story. I really don't see why digg needs to credit a story. The purpose of the site is to aggregate stories from across the web and create a way to vote on them to help other readers prioritize their relevance, popularity, etc. All the "name of the user that submitted the story" feature does is promote needless competition for stories. I want to read good articles and by "good" I mean people dugg it because it was interesting, informative, etc. not "good" as in my buddy is a "good" friend so I dugg it. I am damn near burnt out on digg because of the competition among users and that mostly stems from competing to get your name (or your buddies name) on the front page.
Some blogs are good but I am sick of submits of 1 paragraph blogs that discuss an article -- just submit the damn article and put your comments here rather than in your blog.
I hope that the next version of digg has some of the features that came up last week with the "Digg Duplicates" story. I want to see things on the story page like how many diggs (got that already), how many buries and why (spam, duplicate, etc.), other stores that people think this one is a duplicate of or that duplicates this one, a set of links that people think are direct links to the most relevant article rather than someones blog talking about the article, etc. - misterpony, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11This MPAA story just hit the frontpage with 32 diggs. http://www.digg.com/tech_news/MPAA_If_You_Sue_People_Make_Sure_you_OWN_the_Copyright
Are we sure the algorithm has been changed in the way described? - gotamd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I couldn't agree more with all of you. There are just too many "Upcoming Stories" for me to sift through them myself, and about 90% of them are crap (in my opinion). I rarely go digging through them by myself. Usually I'll just go to my friends' "Dugg Upcoming" and "Agreed On" sections and start from there. It's much more productive, though I still don't digg all the stories I see on those lists...or even most of them.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11There is way too much linking to blogs that link to the actual source just to gain some adwords pennies.
Digg needs a blacklist where if a blog/website is being submitted just as a way to expose ads, then that site url can no longer be 'dugg'. I really hate clicking on a digg story only to see a few sentences and 60 adblocks cluttering the screen.
Why should there be an algorithm? I truely think a story that hits the 'frontpage' should have a minimum of 300 diggs- if its on the frontpage it should be ***** groundbreaking. If we want to see the usual crap we can look in 'up and coming'.
Oh, and just ban youtube/collegehumor/break etc video links from even being frontpage. Useless. - vertinox, on 10/12/2007, -12/+21And maybe less stories from Aaaz ;)
Seriously man... Stop posting so much stuff to digg. - SuckItUp, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12Good I was getting tired of the old one.
if Title.contains("Bush Lied") FrontPage = true; - aristoworks, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11sweet.. no more politics!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Only 6 out of the 15 frontpage stories are about Wii/PS3/xBox.
If there was an update it was a pointless one. - mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Digg won't be complete until it filters-out stories with "title says it all", "WITH PICS!!!!!!!!!" and "Most amazing _________ you will ever see!"
- ThankTheCheese, on 10/12/2007, -5/+12Any chance the digg people can slip this code in:
if($submission == 'Wii box art' || $submission == 'iPhone rumor')
{
bury($submission);
}
;) - Daiken, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10I'd like to hope we'll see less of Aaaz and his buddies, but he'll just get more accounts in order to digg his stories to the front page. We may actually end up seeing even more of just him. Digg needs to start blocking bs accounts like his and the group of 20 or so others who keep digging eachothers posts. They control like 50% of what shows up on the front page.
- digitalrift, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7I'm still waiting for the story entitled "Kevin Rose Hacks into Microsoft to discover their axis of evil with sony that involves taking old, over heating xbox 360's and launching them at the polar ice caps in an attempt to melt them. In accordance to their deal with the GOP.
- Llan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I thought the number of stories to the front page had already went down (especially in Science which I read most of the time). So now it gets even harder? Should't the system try to put an even number of stories on the front all of the time?
- MrBabyMan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I, for one, welcome our new Soviet Russia overlords.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -9/+13when you unfairly weight the importance of a story by factoring who dugg it, it corrupts the process. The fact that wayjer wants to circle jerk with womenofcolour about US guidelines for Exercize really couldn't interest me less.
And people that have so little to do that they submit 30 or 40 stories in an hour tells me that they are more driven by trying to be popular than by bringing interesting news pieces to the forefront. They are like those kids in school that won their popularity by hanging out with cool people.
blech. its making the slashdot/techbargains/ars loop look really good again. - diafel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5It's kind of funny that one of the biggest gamers on this site posted a story about the new algorithm. Webtickle, webtech, aaaaz, chrisek et al: Please die in a fire. I've pretty much stopped coming to Digg because of how prevalent you guys are.
- zackkitzmiller, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Why isn't information this important on blog.digg.com?
- HMTKSteve, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5So, does that mean if I form a group of 1,000 friends who only digg each others stories we can have stories with 1,000 diggs that never make the home page?
- SwampYankee, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8This can't be right, there must be something wrong! How come there are not 75% Apple stories on Digg? Apple Great, Windows sucks, Job's took an iDump...........IPhone Iphone IPhone!!!!!!!
- flink405, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8Yep - Now only hate Bush, the U.S. is always wrong, Windows sucks, Apple is god, Democrats are the best, the World is coming to an end because Al Gore said so will make the front page.
Oops, that´s how its always been... - FastZ, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Less YouTube videos on the front page now? If that happens I'll be happy.
- patience, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8The New Algorithm heh. These guys haven't heard:
Think Progress Digg Army
Michelle Malkin Digg Army
Bash liberals Digg Army
Colbert Digg Army
Stewart Digg Army
Ubuntu Fan Boys
Apple "Rumor of the Day" Fan Boys
Vista Sucks Digg Army
Wii Wii Wii News 24/7 Digg
Ps3 will suck Digg Army
Bash-Apple Fan Boys
Lewrockwell Digg Posse
Michell Malkin Digg Posse
Obsucure Manga/Japanese Show Posse - buckdog05, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3What did old Jobsey have for lunch?
- prototypeangel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Well, in my opinion digg doesen't have enough stories. One out of two stories are about ubuntu or something most people already know about. It's a welcome change, but it appears that people're exploiting digg to increase traffic. But anyways, hopefully it'l change things a bit.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5"So, does that mean if I form a group of 1,000 friends who only digg each others stories we can have stories with 1,000 diggs that never make the home page?"
If you can form a group of 1000 friends that all agree on something you should go into politics. - lane.montgomery, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7Yeah, it wasn't that long ago that the algorithm was altered to allow stories with lower diggs to hit the front page. I think they wanted digg to be more up to date for the large audience of people who sit on the front page and F5 through the day.
The risk to catering to that audience has been outlined in the thread above this one. It just goes to the heart of the debate about the future of digg. I do not envy the digg staff because with every new feature they must constantly strike a balance between the casual digger and the hardcore digger. Everyone wants a front page story, but not everyone deserves one.
I liked it back when a story needed about 100 diggs before it would hit the front page. 50 or 60 diggs to the front page just doesn't cut it for me. Keeping the bar higher encourages middle-of-the-road diggers like me to look for stories to digg up instead of just waiting for the home page to keep rolling them out. It also cuts down on how much I have to catch up on the next day. I checked digg last around 7pm EST yesterday. This morning at 8am I had to go back to the 6th page before I found the last story I read. - Catchpen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Sitting at home unemployed embellishing their blog with Google.
- Ellsass, on 11/05/2008, -1/+41,000 friends... or 1,000 bots
- zacmccormick, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Cool, anything to put better content on the front page sounds good to me. I don't really care that it's harder to get on the front page, that is a good thing. I still think that digg isn't that great for news and social news isn't as good as I anticipated, solely because of the fact that 98% of important news and stuff I really care about is also top news on non-social sites. So basically that leaves digg for tutorial links, daily youtube flings, and personal blog rants about how bad some piece of technology is, which are all cool things, but not really news per se. I mean, if North Korea blows up a nuke or someone wins the superbowl in the last second of the game, why does that require 1,000,000 "news editors" to get that to the front page? I've found myself using feeds from real news sites (foxnews, espn, etc) more and more since I realized how not-that-great digg is for real news.
- GabrielS, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5There's a "Bash Liberals Digg Army"?
lol, where?
How are you going to halt the fan boy army? They're digg users too. - H2SO4, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Ubuntu +1 all others -100 there now you know it.
- cdman98, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Digg has become SELF AWARE!
Beware of the new algorithm. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4biffsputnik: "The reason is not a scam, or gaming, its because there are a lot of submitters who frankly, don't have it.. or are spamming, submitting inaccurate, sensational, front-page-prayer stories."
Totally agree. again, its like a pop fanclub. but those people who simply wake up and go to ars or slashdot and submit everything they see (often not even reading it) are really annoying.
I would rather go read someone's blog (opinion) with a little interpretation, at least there's something original in there.. - Ellsass, on 11/05/2008, -2/+4"Should't the system try to put an even number of stories on the front all of the time?"
Ever heard of a slow news day? We don't want filler, and likewise we don't want good stories being passed over just because a lot is going on at once. - gotamd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3If this is true, then I'm not sure it's necessarily a good thing. Think about it. It's already true that stories submitted by certain high-ranking diggers automatically get a ton of diggs. What I see happening is increasing the barrier for everyone else's stories that don't automatically get 10-15 diggs (or more in some cases) whenever they submit. In fact, I think this could easily make Digg more easy to control and manipulate by large, organized groups since they will be able to control a larger percentage of its content.
- thoand, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Is it just me or has this been deployed on the server yet? Right now the first story "Django Book - Online *FREE* Beta" has 43 digs, the 2nd ("29.8% of Windows XP users consider a move to Linux over Vista") has 42 digs
- balldee93, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This is very evident as of the quality of articles on the front page.
- Scottish, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7Because the creators of Digg don't feel the need to tell the whining hordes ever single thing they do to their algorithm.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3HTM "So, does that mean if I form a group of 1,000 friends who only digg each others stories we can have stories with 1,000 diggs that never make the home page?"
Hopefully, yes! - zacmccormick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2thanks bro, you're pretty cool too. Also, I forgot Fox News only has political news.
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