Digg - News for the Socialites
I’ve been pondering my stance on Digg recently. When I saw Christian Mezei’s Unofficial FAQ regarding the Digg algorithm today, I thought it would be a good time to chime in with my two cents. It was quite an informative post, and I’ll try to touch on some of the main points here, but I highly suggest reading the entire post if you get the chance.
Three notable items that caught my eye have seem to have a large impact on whether or not a story makes it to the Digg frontpage:
The rapidity of the votes. If you get 40-50 votes (no matter what users digg) in the first 30 minutes, you’re probably on the frontpage. If you get 60-70 in the first 18 hours, you’re probably still on the frontpage. If you don’t get at least 60 votes in the first 24 hours, you’re nowhere.
The number of buries your story gets. You can get buried whilst being in the upcoming section, or whilst being on the frontpage. The number of buries that your story needs to receive to be buried really depends, but I think it’s related to the rank of the user who issues the bury, the type of burry (Duplicate Story, Spam, Wrong topic, etc) as well as the number of Diggs the story received. So if you story is in the upcoming section and receives 3 buries, it might get buried. But if it’s on the frontpage with 1000 Diggs, it will take more than 10-15 buries for it to disappear (yet still accessible from Digg, but not beeing present n any category - just by direct linking, or searching with “buried stories” included).
Make friends. Mutual Friends usually digg your stories, so those 10-20 extra diggs can make the difference. You can add a maximum of 4 friends per hour (for spam reasons, and way to go Digg). You can add as many as you would like, and hope that they will add you too, so you will be mutual friends. After that, help your friends (and hope they will do the same) by watching the Submitted by Friends section.
It occurs to me that these items bear absolutely no correlation as to the quality of the story being reviewed. It seems to be all about making friends, hoping they digg your articles, and not pissing anyone off — consequently compelling them to bury your articles.
So this bears the question: Is Digg a true news site, or just a glorified social clique?
It’s probably not valid to claim that getting on the Digg frontpage comes down to a popularity contest, but I think one would have to be pretty naïve to completely disregard the idea that status has a significant impact on an article’s ranking.
Nevertheless, Digg is indicative of the ever-growing paradigm shift in news coverage.
News is becoming viral, socially contextual, and is increasingly less dependent on the validity/quality of the source material involved.
So, if someone likeable with a lot of virtual charisma makes a statement like, “Google is awesome and they’re going to over the world,” he or she would stand a better chance of making it to Digg’s front page than a well-researched piece containing commentary from reputable Wall Street insiders and industry analysts written by someone who is isn’t a part of the clique, as it were.
Welcome to a world of news catered to the socialites.
Joe Lewis
Staff Writer | WebProNews
Joe, please don’t forget the most important point:
So the friends system is a good/bad system. It’s up to each one.
I noticed that, but the mere fact that they had to incorporate that into the algorithm speaks volumes about how important a writer’s community status is to the placement of his/her stories on Digg.
Sure, that might be some sort of a fix, but it doesn’t change the fact that news is moving toward a contextually social medium and popularity is beginning to outweigh content.
I agree Joe.
Moreover, read this story on Netscape. I agree 100% with it. Digg needs to improve a lot of the current features. I have a post that I will publish tomorrow about this.
Hi Joe - good story. I saw Cristian’s earlier in the week too, both of you raise interesting points. There’s alot to praise in digg, but the search functionality(which even Kevin Rose says “sucks”) makes the entire experience kind of hit or miss in terms of whether you can discover content you actually care about, trust, like and thus “digg.” The lack of true “social search” technology behind how friends and shared interests are presented also make it difficult to assess who you should make friends with and whether or not you can trust their recommendations beyond popularity. Searchles (www.searchles.com) which is four months out of the box definitely doesn’t have all the answers to this yet but I do think our approach to presenting content and connecting users bears watching. Searchles allows users to showcase their expertise, enables collaboration with peers and captures it in searchable knowledge indexes. If you want to do something more intelligent with the content you care about and in collaborating with others around it beyond the glory of making it to the home page, it’s worth taking for a spin.