Back in June 2005 when I first wrote about Digg (six days after starting TechCrunch), it took just 15 diggs and a story was automatically sent to the home page of the then small and innocent site (there are lots of old screen shots of Digg in that post). Today it takes an average of 150 or so to get to the Digg home page, although that varies considerably based on the user who submitted the story and the domain name being pointed to.
But tonight some Digg users noticed something a little strange. This story had 936 votes 16.5 hours after it was originally submitted. That’s way beyond what’s normall needed to get on the home page. The next most popular upcoming story in its category had just 178 votes.
If a lot of users vote to bury a story it takes more votes to get to the home page of Digg. But those stories that get a lot of buries tend to be taken off of the upcoming section. In this case, that didn’t happen, and the story just continued to get a ton of votes by users, but was never promoted to the home page (from a brief perusal of the destination story, it seems that this is a story that should have been buried quickly). Perhaps the story just tread a fine statistical line between being promoted and buried, and went on collecting votes until Digg could figure out what to do with it.
So what’s the point? It’s clear Digg is continuing to struggle with vote gaming and trying to maintain their model of letting their users decide what news makes it to the top of the pile. As they add more hurdles and filters, the main side effect seems to be a delay in promoting hot news quickly. It also shows that even a thousand people working together can’t necessarily get a story to the top of Digg. Which is a good thing, I guess.
There are persistent rumors that Digg now employs editors to review upcoming stories before they are promoted, to increase quality. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but it does tend to undermine the theory that the crowd can make better decisions on what constitutes “news” than a single human being using common sense and their best judgment. Digg, for their part, deny that editors are involved in story selection.
Digg may ultimately prove to be a great business model for its founders and investors. But the news revolution that it appeared to be be vanguarding may eventually fizzle out. As, perhaps, will users if they ultimately discover they aren’t, in fact, in charge.
Surely folks at Digg are looking beyond the volume of stories that are dugg and have considered other variables, such as the users who are digging the story, together with the source from which the Diggs are coming from. View count, or in this case, fave count, should not be the only factor that makes up a story’s ranking.
This is really bad to see that Digg may potentially be using editors, the sheer wealth of content may be the case. But Digg isn’t empowering its users any more even beyond this rumour. This whole idea of Recommendations in my opinion is a way for Digg to keep the user more focussed on a small area rather then the rest of the site, that way it may been seen that the system may work more uniquely to promote the story to the homepage depending on the unique Digg profile ie individual users see different Top stories on the homepage.
Perhaps digg has finally realized that their extreme political content is starting to chase away long time users. I remember when digg was a tech site, and it wasn’t recently.
Digg algorithms are really a game for the so called “Power diggers” to manipulate the social bookmarking concept.Such things will keep on happening
The worst thing that ever happened to Digg was the “shout” system. This allows a whole new level of “shout spammers” to simply shout stories to all of their friends (some people have over 1000). It takes away from the value of the story and makes it about the number of the friends.
936 votes? DIGG this!
Arrington, do you really think the algorithm is simple enough to put stuff on the home page just because it has a lot of diggs?
If a story is getting equal amounts of buries as diggs it will never get on the home page. Also there are only a certain amount of home page slots a day, if other things are more popular (read: popular != digg count), then it will take priority.
Well they’ve really never worked too hard to control the gaming aspect of the site, after all you can still digg a story that you have not only never read, but that you haven’t even clicked through to the story. Pretty easy system to game…
One of the reasons I like Fark is that news stories are selected by an admin. There is some favoritism to be sure but it’s a good feeling to get your submission selected and no real way to cheat the system. There’s no way for users to tell who submitted the story.
It all depends on the quality of each of the diggs. I’m not saying I completely understand how Digg works but I do know that each digg is weighted differently.
I think if anything hurts Digg, it’s the abundance of sensationalist headlines that simultaneously lead to spottily fact-checked and poorly written articles (suggesting that people don’t READ these things, just “digg” the sentiment expressed), and also alienate users of minority demographics with respect to the Digg community. A story that casts Bush in a positive light? A story that criticizes iPhone? A positive story about religion, or the (possibly detrimental) politicization of scientific communities? If Digg expands, it’s into its fixed demographic of h4×0rs and mostly left young male adults, and I’m not sure what conquering this self-informed, heavily participatory group will mean for the future of the internet. Is this revolutionary in the grand sense?
Digg is losing to the vote gaming. The people who mutually digg each other’s submissions have taken it to a whole new level, now they send shouts on behalf of each other as well so their submissions get the mutual-diggs from their friends followed by the “varied” diggs that were made a requirement to limit the effect of using your friends to make a story popular.
Incidentally the story you wrote about now has 1130 diggs which is more than double any of the stories on the front page.
Algorithm changes at Digg has destroyed everything.. And the actual stories which are supposed to be at the front page, aren’t there!
Digg is on the other side of downfall..
@Chetan: true, a lot less tech stories get to the front page than a few years ago, but this is due too 2 reasons:-
1) Digg isn’t just for geeks anymore, though its user base still has a lot…
2) Each digg category has a different set of values to measure how popular a story is. Tech stories still get a lot more diggs than other categories, so a story needs more data to be sent to the home page…
I’m sure the digg team changes things every so often to get the balance of stories right so everyones happy, but at the end of the day, if you want the old digg back, head to the tech section, or even better use the new recommendation engine. And if you dont like a story, hit the bury button. (dont go to [insert section you dont like here] and bury everything though!)
Is this perhaps where Mixx is going to eat Digg’s lunch?
Dunno, I still prefer Digg to Mixx though.
Zendad
http://www.zendad.net
I mean, it’s not going to replace google news or anything…but it’s still a fine way to find random interesting “news” and sites.
#12 Samuel:
Well said. As the user base of the internet broadens demographically, the pet ideologies and hobbies of a pocket of Digg junkies will become increasingly irrelevant.
There is nothing wrong if Digg tries to use editors to promote good news to the top page.. But the fact is that these editors try to promote the stories from selective Digg users to the homepage. As a user who has GIVEN UP on Digg just out of sheer frustration because even the best of stories could not get more than 3-4 Diggs, I can tell you that it is a fact.. Name of the user matters…
Digg is good if you want to refer your website on google
Nath
http://www.themostpowerfulcompany.com
With the story about User/Submitter, and how they could manipulate Digg results and seeing how popular it has become, it only makes sense that it’s harder and harder to reach the top (just like with google)
The editorial aspect that they are discussing isn’t a bad idea. It’s what Jason Calacanis mentioned in this interview. It would be a way to deal with it.
The digg system is like a bit odd at times. Stories that are non important and shouldn’t even be posted end up in the tops most of times. It’s all a monopoly.
Call me old school, but I seem to like del.icio.us rankings. Doesn’t seem rigged to me.
I had a front page digg story when digg first started. It took about 150 diggs to get to the home page.
it cost 10k cash to get on the front page
i thought everyone knew this
@Samuel…right on. I like Digg’s technology and appearance, but the way it’s been architected means the loudest crowd with the most technical savvy and free time wins — which bears little demographic resemblance to the wider populace and actually promotes conformity rather than diversity.
Digg ABSOLUTELY requires a manual reviewer within their company for a story to appear on the front page of any of the sections. This is 100% fact, this has been confirmed by an insider.
This is also why Digg stories are now always old and irrelevant, Digg is almost like reading a newspaper in the sense that the posts are what was ‘breaking’ 1-5 days ago.
If you ever want to see what will be on Digg in a few days, look at Reddit (politics/science), Slashdot(tech), and DrudgeReport(news/politics) now.
Digg should have sold long ago when they had the opportunity, what a bunch of greedy clowns.
Maybe that’s why the Founders of the U.S. used a representative republic in designing the country rather than a pure democracy.
Yea, Digg is run by a bunch of fuck weeds. My blog was banned from their site a month ago for no apparent reason other than the fact they rely on 10-20 pussy fucked up diggers to bury shit they feel didn’t come from a website that is big enough or involved with a top digger. And while these 10-20 people are sucking the cocks of the top diggers, Digg is busy promoting their 2nd tier shit blogs covering stories recycled from Rueters last week and claim ‘Original, unique, and interesting content on Digg’.
And you’d figure a website worth millions of dollars might have at least 1 human to answer some questions about why your site was banned. Nope. Email them and they just run your email through a filter and reply back with a piece of the TOS copied/pasted into an email.
Fuck Digg. I can’t wait till the day Digg is worth less than $1 million. I will laugh my ass off because they sat back and fingered the assholes of the top 1% diggers just because if they stopped fingering their assholes then the programmers might have to use those idle fingers to fix the site and make it better.
Digg is a big spam shithole run by a bunch of fuckin treehuggin hippy faggots. I swear i see any more fuckin news on obama, global warming or hybrids i will fuckin puke blood. Fuck digg
Spoken like a typical eloquent republican…
Digg used to be a good place to go for interesting news and user-submitted crap. But it’s no longer a useful place for anyone that respects news and knows the difference between opinion and news.
I agree with other commenters: Many Digg-ers simply digg a story without reading the article. Many submitted stories are innaccurate, old and poorly wriitten. And headlines like this “Constitution Dies Tomorrow” bullshit means Digg can never be taken seriously.
“There are persistent rumors that Digg now employs editors to review upcoming stories before they are promoted, to increase quality.”
Well that’s not working too well considering half of the submissions that hit the frontpage are total shit.
There seems to be some problem with Digg algorithms. I too have noticed many popular stories having more than 800 diggs not being able to make up to the front page. While those having 250 diggs appear on the home page. I hope that the problem better gets solved very soon.
The problem with Digg (and Stumble Upon) is that they let the barrier of entry get way too high. The whole notion of power users is actually antithetical to what they’re trying to accomplish. When someone like MSaleem submits 19,000 stories to Stumble Upon that means each one of his votes should mean less, not more. Same with Digg. The problem now is that a single vote is essentially meaningless because of vote inflation.
‘The crowd can make better decisions on what constitutes “news”’
Mwuahaha, is this serious? Digg is a bunch of dumbass Mactards and Linux fanatics.
A content judged by masses will never work. Doesnt matter how good article is there is always a huge number of frustrated people who’s only goal is to make everything stupid and irrelevant and they make websites like Digg messy and distractive.
I personally let experts to choose content for me. For example I only read TC articles if I want to find out something about technology. This is because I build certain trust in people behind TC. I don’t need 1000 of votes to tell me that I should read article from Michael Arrington. I just know it will be something interesting. At least in 95% of cases.
If you’re dealing with a hot button political issue, you’re likely to get a lot of extreme reactions, split down party lines. Democrats & Republicans are more or less evenly split, so this would explain an equal amount of digg vs. bury votes on a topic like ‘The constitution dies tomorrow’.
A (former) tech centric focused site like Digg probably skews a little more to the left than right, which explains why it’s still in the upcoming section, because the voting isn’t entirely balanced.
I like Mixx when it comes to community support for now, it seem mixx is listening from digg user who are not satisfied with their rating the news.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
Digg is a novel concept and worked for awhile. It’s unfortunately been going downhill in the past year. The average guy has little to no shot of ever getting a front page story. It’s all based around a few users who have a lot of friends and just spend their whole day sending shouts. I’d say 20% of the front page stories are by 5 diggers. That’s just insane.
And it would be one thing if those 5 diggers were pulling up interesting and unique stuff. But they just link to a blog that is linking to a 2-day old news story. It’s why you rarely see anything unique on Digg anymore, and instead just day old news. Digg should honestly either cap the amount of stories you can submit a day (seriously, some guys are submitting hundreds a day), or just lower the value of a vote for an article on someone’s friends list.
12,886 diggs now!
I’ve set up a report to track this every week using the digg api.
http://owenbyrne.com/category/.....oted-list/
I’m sure Mixx will listen to their users opinions and frustrations. Dugg down. Stickiness / hype factor is only for a while.. i’d give it 6 months and that’s it. Same goes for Facebook.
Digg is totally insane, the same 15 users keep on making stories to the front page.
There does seem to be a lot of weighting toward powerusers. But they earned it by contributing to the system, right?
Being the top in digg is the key to your success…
I got my site up in google within couple of hours by submitting on digg.
http://www.americanuniversitycolleges.com/
Hi
I am working on a site which try to solve many of the problems with digg.com.
You can find it on http://crowdnews.eu.
The main problem with digg is the voting system.
When only top voted stories get on the front page it has
to be a subject that many can relate to,
which result in stories with a low information content.
Crowdnews solves this by using sharing instead of voting.
Every have a personal news page on which they can subscribe to other users and when those users share stories they will appear on the personal news page.
Join me on CrowdNews
This is indeed a new knowledge for us. Digg employing editors? That would make it hard for spammers anyway. Thanks, Digg.