January 2011
1 post
1 tag
Digg Staff Pick – A System with no Rationale, What...
I have never been happy with the concept of Hot News/Breaking News, where a single Digg staff picks a story and it stays on the front page for ever and almost always making the top news. However, most times – I do not see these picks entering “Top News in All Topics” as majority of community seldom finds those stories super interesting.
Totally faulty and baseless selections to the staff picks...
November 2010
3 posts
How do digg ads invite a very high number of digg...
No, this post is not criticizing digg nor is something startling disclosed. However, a misconception I had was cleared today. I use adblock and thus rarely see ads (when I use others computers or other browsers for any testing purposes). One thing I always observed was that, the diggable ads received a very high amount of diggs and the reason I guessed was that, as the sponsored stories could stay...
4 tags
Unofficial - Digg Bugs & Feature Requests
While we have all asked several times, there is no central place to make feature requests and bug reports on Digg. No one (users) knows which request is most asked for or which bug affects us all the most.
This is an attempt to aggregate these activity in a central and NEUTRAL location.
Unofficial - Digg Bugs & Feature Requests
4 tags
I am doing a Reddit AMA
Little did I expect this, but there was a request for a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) by me. Quite frankly, I was surprised to see such a request and be up-voted by more than 20 people. I also see that the purpose of it was to learn/expose something about a digg “power user”. No matter what the intention was, I wanted to respond to the request & the up-votes …. so here it is.
October 2010
15 posts
How Was The Traffic From Various Sources (Digg,...
ltgenpanda.tumblr.com was created only around 2-3 pm on Oct 25th. The link was made public around 6:30 pm on Oct 25th. Since then, the site was on various social media sites. Some of the prominent places it was listed are:
Front page of digg since 11 pm CST on Oct 25th, on the top news side bar on the digg front page from about 1-2 am CST on Oct 26th to about 5-6 pm CST...
Responses by Various Digg Users
Various digg users have made very nice arguments on digg. I should stress here that these are just the responses I personally liked. The link to comment on digg does not work well, so I am pasting a few here:
Response by davidtc:
“We’ve used test accounts since day one…” Day 1 of what? Of the new algorithm on October 15th? Of V4? Day 1 of the last 4 years? “Most...
In Response to The Digg Blog Post
Digg has responded publicly to the post I made yesterday and I appreciate their willingness to address this. I feel obligated to give my feedback/response – not in the expectation that digg will further address it.
Defending my post yesterday – nothing I wrote yesterday has been proved wrong. Digg has told a “reason” for having done it.
It is up to each individual whether they accept/trust...
Second Confirmation About Digg's Involvement
While one reason to have contacted digg was to give them a chance to explain themselves, the other reason was to see if these diggs stop in the time period when ONLY digg knows about this post.
As written in my earlier post, I went public about this whole issue at sharp 6:34 PM, CST. Here is the first email I sent at 5:23 PM CST:...
Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher...
Digg recently published a blog post titled “Digg’s Algorithmic Mystery Tour” on October, 15th. While a Digg blog post is a normal thing, a post about the algorithm was very surprising to me. Why did Digg, which never bothers to blog about very visible changes, numerous bugs and issues, decided to blog about its secret “algorithm”? They never even verbally discussed it in public. Since...
One Page Version of - Mystery Behind the “Digg’s...
Digg published a blog post titled “Digg’s Algorithmic Mystery Tour” on October, 15th. While a digg blog post is just normal, a post about the algorithm was very surprising to me. How come Digg which never bothers to blog about very visible changes, numerous bugs & issues – decided to blog about its most hidden “algorithm”? They never even verbally discussed about it in public. And since then...
I have contacted digg ....
I asked for a phone number for the Communication Director, but was told that they could take over this by email. I sent an email as below:
————————————————————
Here is the link:
http://ltgenpanda.tumblr.com/post/1399805023/mystery-behind-the-diggs-algorithmic-mystery-tour
Runs...
So now what?
I can keep writing about this for ever …. but nothing is going to change. This is happening even this minute (4.27 pm CST, Oct 25th), but I got to conclude.
I am going to split this into two pieces – The piece titled “By Digg” is meant to be read if you think digg has a direct involvement in this (as I do) and the piece titled “Not by Digg” is meant to be read if you think digg is not...
Is there a pattern to their digging?
So, is there any time pattern among these suspicious diggs? How would these stories compare to other regular stories? I am now showing some charts, with all of the stories in them needing 63 diggs to enter the top news. The 63 is just arbitrary, but useful in comparing the data. There are 8 suspicious stories with 63 upcoming diggs, so I am randomly picking 8 non-suspicious stories as well.
X...
They are not spammers, what have they achieved?
How many pops did these domains gets by diggs from these suspects? 229. However, just one digg from one these IDs should not make any of the stories by themselves suspicious, so I am now going to list all of the 229 stories and the number of suspect diggs and non suspect diggs. While whether the digg is suspect or non suspect is clear, remember that due to promote_date confusion in digg data, the...
So, What have they been digging? May be just...
How much have these suspect’s diggs been spread across the various domains in 2390 stories we are analyzing. The data used is from Oct 1st, however this “operation” only began after Oct 15th. Domain(count) newsfeed.time.com (644) dailymail.co.uk (578) boingboing.net (461) techcrunch.com (440) telegraph.co.uk (408) youtube.com (395) huffingtonpost.com (378) collegehumor.com (331)...
Who and how many are they?
Doing some pattern matching, 159 users are suspicious. And here they are with links to their profiles: a1 a3 a5 d10 d11 d12 d13 d14 d15 d16 d17 d2 d4 d5 d6 d8 d9 dd1 dd13 dd14 dd15 dd16 dd17 dd18 dd19 dd2 dd20 dd21 dd23 dd26 dd27 dd28 dd3 dd30 dd33 dd34 dd35 dd36 dd37 dd38 dd39 dd4 dd41 dd42 dd43 dd45 dd46 dd47 dd5 dd6 dd7 dd8 dd9 diggerz10 diggerz11 diggerz13 diggerz14 diggerz16 diggerz17...
Did only the domains change or much more?
Now that it is obvious that the algo change on Oct 15th has affected the chance of certain domains popping, I went forward to download ALL the UPCOMING diggs (227,936 diggs) made to any story (2390 stories) which eventually entered top news since Oct 1st. I should here note that, as explained in the digg blog post, certain stories have had the “promote date” timestamp updated and thus, a few diggs...
Did the new algo really change anything?
I began with downloading the details about all “top news stories” in the month of October, to see how many stories have “popped” and how spread have the domains popped been across the month.
There is nothing particularly to be noticed in the chart above. And here is a bit more information on the top news domains. Interactive Data
Now, what are the top 20 domains (by the number of stories in a...
Mystery Behind the “Digg’s Algorithmic Mystery...
Digg published a blog post titled “Digg’s Algorithmic Mystery Tour” on October, 15th. While a digg blog post is just normal, a post about the algorithm was very surprising to me. How come Digg which never bothers to blog about very visible changes, numerous bugs & issues – decided to blog about its most hidden “algorithm”? They never even verbally discussed about it in public. And since then...
