Comments on: Understanding digg: rate, not volume

By: twopointouch » Another post

twopointouch » Another post — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 18:39:43 +0000

[…] This is a post with more writing and also a picture. My first attempts to understand digg, the news-voting site, were a bit of a shambles, to be honest. I tried to work out the order and content of the front page and ended up in a tangle of half-remembered Maths lessons. Owen Byrne, senior software engineer at the service, put me out of my misery by commenting that the order was actually chronological according the time stories were promoted to the top. I also commented on the importance of rate and topic, which may have been less useless.Yesterday, Fred Stutzman posted something to revive my interest. He was talking about the moaning and groaning about the power of top users and the voting blocs around them. Essentially, he says the reason for this is because we need some way to sort through the thousands of stories submitted to digg. Users canâ€™t read them all, a lot of them are spam anyway, and so we develop coping mechanisms.My first attempts to understand digg, the news-voting site, were a bit of a shambles, to be honest. I tried to work out the order and content of the front page and ended up in a tangle of half-remembered Maths lessons. Owen Byrne, senior software engineer at the service, put me out of my misery by commenting that the order was actually chronological according the time stories were promoted to the top. I also commented on the importance of rate and topic, which may have been less useless. […]

By: Understanding digg again, natural order at twopointouch: web 2.0, blogs and social media

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 15:58:06 +0000

[…] My first attempts to understand digg, the news-voting site, were a bit of a shambles, to be honest. I tried to work out the order and content of the front page and ended up in a tangle of half-remembered Maths lessons. Owen Byrne, senior software engineer at the service, put me out of my misery by commenting that the order was actually chronological according the time they were promoted to the top. I also commented on the importance of rate and topic. […]

By: Ian Delaney

Ian Delaney — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 23:17:21 +0000

That’s good information, Owen & Dave. And obviously, the next comparison that needs to be made is between page one and page two. Were I a statistician, I’m sure I’d relish that…

By: Owen Byrne

Owen Byrne — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 21:21:14 +0000

The order of items on the front page is chronological based on the time they are promoted, which is not actually shown (just the date they are posted). The promotion algorithm itself has nothing to do with the order on the front page.

By: David Cruickshank

David Cruickshank — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 20:35:18 +0000

Rate intuitively feels right as an important ingredient of popularity. If my website gets 1000 hits, it’s more popular if it happens in an hour than if it happens over the course of a year. I’m fairly sure that the homepage is also designed to be inclusive of members of each of the categories where possible. I see a lot of sport articles on there that have far fewer diggs for instance. Rate as a proportion of total diggs in that category might be interesting to look at.