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January 23, 2008

Digg Changes Algorithm: No More Group Voting Up Stories

Duncan Riley

37 comments »

Kevin Rose has posted details tonight of a major change to the Digg Algorithm that would seemingly put an end to group voting up stories.

According to Rose, the changes are focused on ensuring that “the most popular content dugg by a diverse, unique group of diggers reaches the home page.”

Rose gives an example of the new algorithm keeping a story with over 100 votes in the upcoming list based on a diversity rank, essentially saying that group voting amongst friends will now work against a story. Rose was not clear as to at which point a story with a low diversity score can break out of the upcoming stories, but at the time writing some stories in upcoming show over 140 votes, higher than the previous levels required to make the front page.

The Drill Down show tonight suggested that the changes would mean that new members without Digg friends would have a better chance of stories making the front page than established users (as friends usually vote for stories from friends), and that the changes would result in massive fraud attempts using fake accounts to try and manipulate the new diversity system.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:25 pm

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Comments

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  1. Adrian Keys

    January 23rd, 2008 at 9:50 pm

    Group voting was a dumb idea in the first place…it’s a welcome change. As we all know though, Digg users can get what they want so we will see if this is another revolt in the making.

  2. Jordan Golson

    January 23rd, 2008 at 9:52 pm

    I wouldn’t go so far as to say he “posted details” of the new algorithm. He posted more non-explanations, like he did over the “secret editor” post we wrote.

    What, no link to my actual reporting Duncan?

  3. Dave

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:00 pm

    this is a monumental move on their part. i’ve see these group votes take place and it infuriates me.

    ..and so often, the original contributor doesn’t get the populous vote because he wasn’t part of a group/newbie.

    good move kevin!

  4. Evangelist

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:06 pm

    So their new algo works against their SNS feature?

  5. Duncan Riley

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:08 pm

    Jordan
    read between the lines of the gobblygook

  6. Tech For Novices

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:15 pm

    duncan nothing yet on age targetted adsense ads via demographic adwords?

  7. Digg Support Email No Answer

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:20 pm

    If Kevin Rose was serious about that, they’d unban ALL of the sites that have been wrongly banned by various Digg gangs.

  8. Gabe

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:24 pm

    It’s an arms race Digg has no choice but to fight. One problem is that every incremental improvement to bump off the ad-hoc bottom-feeding groups increases the potential reward for the major players. The economics favor the gamers. And even if Digg manages to stay a step ahead, the best they can hope for is an even lower common denominator than they’ve already sunk to.

    The Digg model results in tabloid quality–it’s enough for a decent business, but it will never get any respect. Social news is a powerful concept, but I think the big giant general purpose front page is of limited value. The future is personalized social news. It could address both the economic spam factor and the lowest common denominator problem.

  9. Search◊ Engines Web

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:55 pm

    Unfortunately, it still may not do that much good. If those bonding together just compensate by bonding even more and NOT voting for anyone else NOT in their friends group.

    The amount of friends you have will help your post get noticed. Why does Rose have a 100% homepage success with THOUSANDS of friends?

    Even a story submitted here - got on Digg homepage in under 3 hours- most take 17 hours. It ended up with only 800 diggs total - not thousands of Diggs that those early homepage getters usually get.

    But the catch 22 is the fact that careers can be launched by being a top member - so they do have a right to get compensation for their hard, free labor that is helping a company survive. Most of the members never submit anything.

  10. Marcelo

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:56 pm

    Im surprised. Whats Happens?

    Att,
    Marcelo

  11. Technicle

    January 23rd, 2008 at 10:57 pm

    In brief, the only real solution is to just keep changing the algorithms.. the only sure thing is to just keep changing.. no news is bad news… so, keep coming.. keep changing.. :-D

  12. Planet Malaysia

    January 23rd, 2008 at 11:14 pm

    Welcome to the new changed. I think this will be good algorithm and fair enough

  13. Lochaber Local

    January 23rd, 2008 at 11:26 pm

    If it’s not perfect, it’s at least a major step in the right direction (on paper). I’m waiting to see the impact, and hopeful as well.

  14. Anderson Palmer

    January 23rd, 2008 at 11:53 pm

    Wow!!!! Kevin Rose called into the Drill Down with Jay Adelson now!

    They are discussing this issue live on Ustream

  15. Rushabh Choksi

    January 24th, 2008 at 1:56 am

    i am not surprised. this was suppose to happen other wise they would have lost many members.

  16. Banking and Credit blog

    January 24th, 2008 at 4:47 am

    finally,
    the digg mafia days come to an end:D

  17. Steve

    January 24th, 2008 at 5:58 am

    Does this mean Arrington will stop asking his friends via skype to digg up stories.

    I suppose Arrington doesn’t need digg anymore given anything TC write goes to the top of Techmeme.

  18. Erick

    January 24th, 2008 at 6:13 am

    Digg is filled with a ton of snot nosed kids with nothing better to do. Its a really nice website if the majority of the users of it weren’t such a discouragement.

  19. Jason

    January 24th, 2008 at 6:37 am

    Yeh Erick, it’s a really great news site if your main interests include LOLCats and urban ninja videos.

  20. I Am Not Posting To Spam My Blog

    January 24th, 2008 at 6:46 am

    % <— world’s smallest violin playing No-One Cares About Ron Paul, Get Over Yourself In B Minor.

  21. Coupons

    January 24th, 2008 at 7:17 am

    I usually don’t submit stories to digg because I knew how tough it was to rank without a big group and lots of friends. It’s a welcomed change.

  22. .rb

    January 24th, 2008 at 7:32 am

    would like to see

    Digg powered by Google.

    I think Google could do a real good job - of making a algo for digg.

    .rb

  23. Russell Heimlich

    January 24th, 2008 at 8:12 am

    Hmm so Digg.com wants to be a social community with friends and relationships but the algorithm goes against those said relationships? This sounds bad.

  24. bs

    January 24th, 2008 at 8:35 am

    noone said digg doesnt want to be a social community. Its just a news aggregator. this had to be done to stop the “cheating”

  25. Andy

    January 24th, 2008 at 8:41 am

    Wont work - Digg is a social promotion tool so groups will win. Only way is to get rid of social aspects of the site.

  26. Jeremy L.

    January 24th, 2008 at 8:57 am

    I agree with Russell–this discourages you from having friends who have similar interests.

    I’m pretty active online, but to me Digg became essentially irrelevant a long time ago. Every time I go there, most of what is on the front page is time-wasting garbage.

  27. Jason

    January 24th, 2008 at 10:15 am

    Democracy does not work because the masses are stupid. That’s why the United States is a Republic, because a Democracy is self destructive.

  28. Josiah

    January 24th, 2008 at 10:53 am

    Top Digg users have told me personally that it’s always been easier to get stories on the Digg front page if submitted by a random account than their own “power” user account.

    Now apparently it’s even easier, yet harder for power users to author/submit top content. Somehow this doesn’t make much sense to me.

    Why build a social network only to use it against the top users?

    Oh yeah … money.

  29. dumbfounder

    January 24th, 2008 at 11:08 am

    Did they dub this the antisocial algorithm? Why not have it so whoever you are connected to influences what you see? Those people you trust, and the people they trust, should count for more than just random people. Why does it matter that there is a universal homepage and that everyone sees the same thing?

  30. Chris

    January 24th, 2008 at 11:13 am

    I used to really like Digg because it basically showed me a ton of articles I probably would have never seen. I’ve never submitted anything there, but I like the idea of more articles hitting the front page, not less…

    who cares if some spam or some ron paul news makes the front page? it’s gone so quickly or buried if it is spam, and at least a wide variety of stuff gets a chance…

  31. Todd Moon

    January 24th, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    Can we eliminate group voting for the 2008 elections?

    Joking aside, if it simply checks your friends list to see if you’re a “group”, can’t people just stop being “digg friends” and post things to digg in IM chats, Twitter posts, etc, instead?

    Then again, if it’s NOT that case that these groups are maliciously gaming Digg, that instead they are simply digging what their friends digg as a matter of habit, then the change is good and will work out nicely.

  32. Devlin

    January 24th, 2008 at 3:28 pm

    So…basically they went and released all these features to make the site more social and increasing user to user interaction with the main goal of improving the flow of relevant news through your “friends” and then change their algorithm to basically nullify any benefit that could have possibly come out of that feature.

    I guess on a per user basis as long as the social features are allowing each person to find different stories that interest them then I guess the new features are still worthwhile. But to then change your algorithm so that the heaviest users of your site who actually use these features so that their contributions don’t matter doesn’t really make much sense. One of the main draws of Digg is that users like to see their contributions matter, and if they are being penalized for actually using the features of the site such as “shouting” to help spread relevant news then really, what’s the point of any of it?

    I guess it depends on the parameters of the algorithm really, maybe it’s only going after major groups that tend to follow specific voting patterns, but that’s not what it sounded like to me.

  33. Sean

    January 25th, 2008 at 12:46 pm

    Hopefully this will put an end to the stupid political articles that end up on Digg every day. They should just put a complete filter on those and call it good.

  34. supaswag

    February 4th, 2008 at 1:45 am

    The shocking reality: What REALLY goes on behind the curtains at digg.com >> http://supaswag.blogspot.com/2.....gg-it.html

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