Last week, Neil Patel reported that Digg is making it harder to get Dugg. I can certainly vouch for that. An ex-client and friend of ours launched what was (at least in my opinion) a highly Digg-worthy article on the Ten Servers that Changed the World. We didn't do any work on the project, but Corey Donovan from Vibrant (whose intelligence and positive attitude made him a pleasure to work with) asked for our input and, for our part, the SEOmoz crew thought it was a sure-fire Digg winner. Corey went so far as to recruit help from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to make the piece the best it could be.
Matt wrote the Digg submission piece and it had some initial pickup, gaining around 34 Diggs in the first 24 hours. While this would normally put the piece in front of a lot of Diggers (thanks to both the friend system and the constant appearances on the upcoming page), we were surprised to see that the Diggs slowed down, and 3 days later, there's only 43 Diggs.
Now, the piece still has the opportunity to play at Slashdot, Del.icio.us, Netscape & possibly even Reddit, but the Digg failure certainly made us take note. SEOmoz's usual success rate with pieces we believe have a high liklihood of getting Dugg currently stands at about 70%. We've launched around ~50 efforts in the past six months and had approx. 35 of those stories make the frontpage. Honestly, I don't know how well this stacks up to other marketers who use Digg as a tool. Certainly, if you wanted to go black hat, you'd have a fairly easy time either buying the Diggs, setting up 4 or 5 dozen extra Digg accounts through proxies or leveraging a large network of friends (all tactics that we haven't engaged in).
To help learn from this experience, I thought I'd explore what signals might be in the Digg algorithm and how the Digg operators could be tweaking these:
- Number of Diggs in a time period
- Number of independent members voting the story up
- Number of new members vs. experienced members
- Number of votes off "upcoming" page
- Number of votes off "friends" pages
- Number of votes off the "Dugg" page (through an embedded "Digg this" button)
- Temporal pattern matching
- Up votes vs. down votes
- Number of comments and comments over time
- Number of Diggs vs. area of content focus
- Manual review by admin/moderation team
There might be more that I'm unaware of, but these would be the ones I'd operate with. Using these signals, restricting spam and promoting higher quality stories (Digg's two primary goals) could be achieved. Lots of folks complain about the quality of what shows up on Digg, and there's obviously a huge topical bias, but Digg still has the largest, most achievable audience for linkbait, and will remain popular for marketers for the foreseeable future.
How have your successes and failures gone over at Digg? What's your feeling on the tightening of the algo to reduce the number of frontpage stories?
p.s. Full Disclosure - Vibrant Servers was a client of ours up until a few months ago. We may work with them again in the future (fingers crossed, since I'm a big fan).
p.p.s. Cristian Mezei also did a great piece on Digg's algo last week, noting many of the same points I have (his analysis is actually even more in-depth).
So if less items make it to the front page and items stay on the front page for a lot longer now, can we expect that much more traffic?
This is turning into an arms race. Digg just made it harder to game their site, but at the same time they made the front page more valuable by maybe doubling the traffic it's worth and cutting the number of stories that make it there by more than half.
If it wasn't worth it to game Digg full time before, it might be now.
The Title may also have been somewhat of a problem
SearchEngines just submitted it to Netscape - using a different perspective https://tech.netscape.com/story/2006/11/07/ten...
However, Digg is still in an experimental stage - there will be ongoing Injustices and Casualties while they try to find a balance -
It is not hard to imagine how much abuse they have been through to have finally set these draconian filters -
Users must be understanding while the Algos are tweaked as much as their techology & Budget & Manpower will allow.
:ROFL - Look what even happened to SearchEngines after becoming a PageOne Top user, even with over 100 users adding to their Friend's List -
https://digg.com/users/SearchEngines/
Stuntdubl's right-- Digg is adapting about 1000x faster than Wikipedia at adapting to manipulation (I suppose $60M will help to achieve that & a few beers).
& Will writes a great post. I just hope it stays an "open" system and not so cloistered as the slashdot system that is more heavily moderated and editorialized.
Isn't the cloistering of Digg exactly what we're seeing with a more advanced algo?? You're right that it shouldn't become so closed as to rival Slashdot, but the same thing is happening here, most purposefully indeed. The more users that join Digg, the more "importance" and "weight" are given to those original Diggers, so to speak. They become an even smaller percentage of the population who are so influential, the bona fide "digg authorities".
It's crushing to know that even after putting so much time & effort into creating a piece with unquestionable quality & diggability that it still ends up at the behest of this Digg-elite, these diggers with their big shovels and heavy cursors. Baah.
I don't really think it's quickly. I think it's about time. As I've said in comments on this blog before, Digg was way out of control for the last six months. I am really glad they took these steps. However I hope Daily Show & Colbert Report videos still make it to the home page with no problems!
Interesting speculations are afoot here. Digg is one of those explosive phenomenon that has hit the web in the last few years. I look at Digg like an open system, whereas Slashdot would be a closed system. For the most part Digging a story is much easier than going through the Slashdot approval process. And users are from all sectors of the public on Digg. Slashdot users are more of the technological elite. By incorporating more of the editorial processes like moderation, user reputation and so forth to rank an article on Digg, I think it begins to move away from the "openness" of the whole system. However, I would like to see where this goes. I think Kevin Rose started something great and abreast of buyout talks, this puts the whole Digg community into a new light. They have been the underdog for some time and I would welcome a vital and legitimate competitor to *cough* the slashdot community. I just hope it stays an "open" system and not so cloistered as the slashdot system that is more heavily moderated and editorialized. I like both and hope that both survive in their own right. In the short term some of these algo changes to the way a digg is dugg (lol) may effect legitimate articles, however in the long run I think it will improve the chance of legitimately written and dugg pieces of coming out on top.
That was an excellent article - and definitely with a quality geek perspective.
It's pretty interesting to see how QUICKLY digg is adapting.
All this talk of algorithms makes Digg look like the new Google.
From my point of view the front page seems to stay much the same all day until 4.30pm UK time when it seems to refresh and a whole bunch of new stories replace the old ones. I preferred the old Digg that changed all day. At present there is no incentive to visit every half hour like I used to.
agreed. digg used to get a lot more of my pageviews throughout the day, but it's extremely stagnant in comparision to its previous versions.