What is Digg?42 Comments
- canewediggit, on 07/08/2008, -5/+45system needs some work- i got recommendations from little green footballs yesterday (and a number of other right wing partisan blogs), i see a bunch of spam garbage regularly, and so much celebrity nonsense i think i'm looking at people magazine's site. if someone can explain what in my digg history triggers this, i'd like to know.
can someone just fix the spy already? instead of spending all this time figuring ways for me to be more social, how about you let me find my news the way i want to? it's gotten to the point where i can only find interesting stories if my friends or the system recommends them. the further along the social networking path this site gets, the ***** it gets. i'm here for news, not friends. - tomboy501, on 07/08/2008, -0/+13@gbarberi "...we know that there are many alternative motivations to digging posts."
haha! You have absolutely hit the nail on the head. That is exactly why the recommendation engine will fail in it's intended purpose. Until user habits change around here.... - gbarberi, on 07/08/2008, -1/+14The more users they let into the beta, the worse my recs get. Unfortunately, the system is flawed. When it pairs me with some other digger and recommends their diggs to me, it assumes that they dugg it because it generally interested them. But, we know that there are many alternative motivations to digging posts.
I've been removing several users from my DRE each day due to blatant spam and the same crap you're finding.
Something else is a little odd about this engine. Every digger I've been paired with so far has an avatar. While I don't know the exact proportion of diggers with versus without avatars, I find it suspicious that no digger without an avatar has been paired with me, yet. It looks like something is being done by hand. - Daniel591992, on 07/08/2008, -0/+12Maybe if they fix the shouts and friends problem, the content will be better. Most people that make it on to the FP only make it because they have tons of digg "friends" and use them to build a network digging each other's stories to the front page. Look at the friends of the person that submitted this story. Many of them have dugg over 500 stories in the past 48 hours. How is that even possible? Digg user KevinFederline dugg 1011 stories in the past 48 hours. Look at his shouts: http://digg.com/users/KevinFederline/history/shout ...
When is the digg team going to address the obvious gaming going on? Until then, the recommendation engine is going to be flawed by people who digg things that don't even interest them. - tomboy501, on 07/08/2008, -0/+11It's so bad for me that I sometimes think the system generates a Recommended to Bury list of stories for me to look at. The rest of the stories I see are a filtered list of the most active diggers submissions, which I can get off of my friends' list anyway.
I miss digg spy too. That really was the best way to see the best obscure content on the site. It's been timing out after about 30 seconds for weeks now. There's not even a link on the home page for it any more. I think they want to kill it off. - laserob, on 07/08/2008, -0/+10I thought I'd enjoy it, but find myself going to display all every time instead. I wish I could default back to that. Maybe I just have a stubborn "don't tell me what I like" attitude.
- inactive, on 07/08/2008, -4/+14I think the recommendation system ***** sucks.
- canewediggit, on 07/08/2008, -0/+8*****, i didn't even know you could remove users from recs. i've been removing friends that seem to be auto-digging in an effort to clean up my 'diggs in upcoming' friend activity. guess i can go remove the digger that got this in my recs right now;
http://digg.com/tech_news/_7432 - digg thinks i can read russian apparently.
my avatar/non split seems about 50/50. but i don't have anyone with higher than a 15% match and don't really see why i should be getting recs from people with 2-3% similar, as much of my list is. - misterpony, on 07/08/2008, -0/+7The DRE is working pretty good for me. But to get there I've had to recheck the containers I am interested in (for me, I removed all Videos, Offbeat and Entertainment) and I removed about 10 diggers from the recommendation list. Once I've done all that, I see a pretty decent list of recommended stories. I don't digg many of them, but at least they are on topic with my interests. I still bury a ton of stories and many in the Recommended queue, so maybe that's helping me.
Ditto about Digg Spy. - inactive, on 07/08/2008, -0/+6The title: "More Details on How it Works" was not reflected in the story.
- Barackalypse, on 07/08/2008, -0/+6Articles of interest, you mean like the Digg front page, because the front page usually has 2 articles at any time that I find interesting enough to follow and read, whereas in two pages of Digg's recommendation's I didn't find a single topic of interest. I think that takes some skill, to use data about what I said I have liked and disliked and yet still do a substantially worse job than something that the site has had since the very beginning.
- misterpony, on 07/08/2008, -0/+6It be interesting to see which Digg users have most often been removed from Recommendations. I bet this kevinfederline guy would be at the top of that list. How in the hell could you possibly read or even have an interest in 1011 stories in 48 hours? He must be forcing himself into many people's Recommended Users lists with that scheme.
- kwilms, on 07/08/2008, -4/+9Nice article. It includes a quote from Riedl at the end! He seems to like it. Cool!
- benologist, on 07/08/2008, -0/+5The problem is the recommendations are made based on you and me digging the same story, it's a weak criteria so the results are more random than personalized. They know where I digg the most, they know what I digg the most, they know what I bury, but none of that seems to be a factor in my recommendations.
I bury every stupid pic and piece of garbage I see, and there's some obvious patterns there that could tell you pretty definitively I'm not a fan of huffpo or various blogs that take a piece of news and reduce it to a few sentences stuffed between a dozen ad blocks. And then I get more of it recommended to me because some random digg user I didn't even know existed dugg the same story as me recently.
There's pros and cons for what they're doing though. If they didn't show the crap we dislike then nobody would bury it which would eventually give those sites and spam a stronger presence on the site. It's important the spam and unworthy material get buried but in my opinion it should be sitting in the "all" upcoming, not the shortlist of recommendations that are personalized for me. - sfrench, on 07/08/2008, -0/+4The old-style upcoming is still there. Click "All" in the right corner above the story list.
- reuscel, on 07/08/2008, -3/+7I'll just say I hate the new "Upcoming" section. I liked being able to peruse every article and choose myself which ones I like. This new system really sucks.
- Conwaysb0718, on 07/08/2008, -0/+3I dont really care for the recommendations as of this moment. I rarely find myself interested in anything thats recommended and more often than not immediately click over to the regular new submission page. I do kinda like seeing the other users who are X percent like me, but even then, at this point i really dont care about it for as much work seems to be going into it.
- inactive, on 07/08/2008, -1/+4canewediggit, said, "i'm here for news, not friends." then why of all things do you have 350 friends? Can you answer that?
- Surferess, on 07/08/2008, -0/+3I hate it! It continually defaults to the recommended page and is very hard to use the old upcoming one which was a lot better for me. It would be nice if you got a choice of what view loads, but you don't. Additionally, you would think having your story at the top of upcoming would help, but it appears not to anymore. Only matters if it is recommended.
- vinceislegend, on 07/08/2008, -1/+4It's magic. That's how.
- inactive, on 07/08/2008, -0/+3Again, put it on it's own tab. That algorithm will never find articles of interest to me. While you're add it, add a Huffington Post tab that I won't click on either.
- sockpuppets, on 07/08/2008, -1/+4It works like a Ralph Wiggum algorithym, it just choo-choo-chooses you.
- sfrench, on 07/09/2008, -0/+2It's random selection. The problem with hand-picking anything is that you skew the sample towards particular characteristics.
- ThirdPrize, on 07/09/2008, -0/+2I have no friends on here and I hardly ever Digg anything. Let's see how it handles that.
- fishbeef33, on 07/08/2008, -1/+3"To keep recommendations from being all over the map, each user is viewed and rated by MrBabyMan, who uses the information to select not only which Digg user is matched to others with like interests, but also to plan unique groups that will either live or die depending on his whims, once he becomes supreme ruler of the Internet."
Seriously folks, I like the new system. And if you don't, please just keep in mind that Digg is by far still the most user-customizable of all of the sites of its kind. - ironeus, on 08/01/2008, -0/+2I think there are still quirks in its algorithm and room for improvement. Friends I regularly share stories with show up in the mid-teens percentage match so the ratio doesn't make sense right now. Gbarberi has a point too -- I don't see non-avatars so maybe that's a (hidden) requirement.
- likwidtek, on 07/08/2008, -2/+4Workin pretty good for me. Obviously there are some stories that I don't digg but it's a much better way to browse upcoming.
- YodaJones, on 07/09/2008, -0/+1This feature sucks sweaty balls. Please remove it or move it out of the way and don't default to it.
- seanieb, on 07/08/2008, -0/+1http://digg.com/all/upcoming Bam...sorted.
- SheilaNoya, on 07/08/2008, -2/+3I like it now that I've gotten used to it, but I agree with others that Digg needs to give you an option to choose "Display All Upcoming" as your default, instead of automatically defaulting to "Recommended Stories" every time.
The "Recommended" feature is pretty damn accurate (for me anyway). The names on the list are of people whom I already trust and know that most of them actually READ the article before just Digging up a title. They usually submit factual articles, not *****, so this adds a quick way to find them. (I don't use the "Friends" or Shouts" features on Digg - that's just my preference).
I'd actually like this new system better if they also added a "Dugg Down" list. Then you could help bury the ***** articles or the blatant lies that keep being submitted in the political sections. Too many people post garbage from their hate-filled "blogs" rather than credible information and this kind of crap needs to be wiped out more quickly. - gbarberi, on 07/08/2008, -0/+1I don't think it's a "hidden requirement." I think Digg is hand selecting who gets in the beta as opposed to letting some software select accounts randomly.
- benologist, on 07/08/2008, -0/+1@ Daniel - they addressed it by requiring a more diverse range of diggs so your friends digging your own story isn't enough to make it go popular.
Unfortunately the spammers are addressing that by making sharing a requirement in addition to the digg swapping - they send a shout to their friends with your story, you send a shout to your friends with their story, everybody just got a hundred or more "varied" diggs. - sfrench, on 07/09/2008, -0/+1You bring up an point worth mentioning "netflix did better"
Completely hypothetical situation, but imagine if you had to pay for each digg you made. Besides the obvious fact that you would probably digg less, how would you expect that your digging behavior change? And how do you think that altered behavior would feed back into a recommendation engine that looks at diggs that you have made in common with somebody else?
Or the converse. Imagine you could rent all the moves you wanted from Netflix, and could request moves as often as you wanted, to the tune of dozens or hundreds per day. Do you think Netflix's recommendations would be as good?
In systems like Netflix and Amazon, those two systems have a cost associated with the "choice", and therefore the inputs to the recommendation engines tend to represent a person's taste quite accurately. - TJ11240, on 07/09/2008, -0/+1Can't digg use more than the last 30 days?
- Daniel591992, on 07/08/2008, -0/+1@benologist - I remember when they did that. It's just made the problem worse IMO. Any staff member reading this????
- kishosingh, on 09/07/2008, -0/+1Not details in article. I want to know how I can recommend a story in digg?
- stutimandal, on 07/08/2008, -2/+1It just uses the bootstrap method from Frequentist approach of Statistics. It just counts how many articles I had in common with other diggers and forms a percentage to recommend.
And someone said it gives erratic recommendations; that's because Bootstrap method will converge slowly towards the actual distribution of recommendation. You need to digg at least 1000 pages before you start getting close. - shadowspawn, on 07/08/2008, -6/+3i don't really like it, and i think it's a pain in the ass. add insult to injury it is shoved right in the registered user's face.
turn it off by default. what makes you think i want to see what i actually don't? it exposes a really big flaw in "recommended".
I've never dug an article yet from it. It's an annoyance.
at least i can tell what digg is trying to recommend and learning from their mistakes, and what *not* to do from observation of a flawed system. i also can tell what sites with targeted advertising are being recommended as well.
this is a study on what not to do to a social site.
shame on you, digg conceptual programmers.
shame on you.
netflix did better.
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