Hi everyone,

We wanted to address some complaints about weaknesses in our duplicate detection mechanism and provide some insights on upcoming changes to the Digg promotional algorithm. I head up Research and Development at Digg and my team is responsible for many of the advances in the promotional algorithm and the logic that powers features like the Recommendation Engine and Search.

Duplicate submissions have been an ongoing issue, and we are working on several new tools that will help address this. Improvements in duplication detection are underway and expected soon. We’re also working on a new system that will, among other things, allow us to track users who abusively submit duplicate content. While we haven’t fully hammered out all the details, the tool will likely include warnings and limits on duplicate submissions.

Another area of recent community debate has focused on home page diversity, and the concentration of certain popular submitters. Our goal is to give each person a fair chance at getting his or her submission promoted to the home page. Digg’s promotional algorithm aims to ensure that the most popular content Dugg by a diverse, unique group of diggers reaches the home page. Since Digg began over four years ago, we’ve been making ongoing tweaks to the promotional algorithm. We spend a lot of time analyzing the data and improving the system. While most of these changes go unnoticed, we will be testing different approaches to increase submitter diversity in the upcoming months.

We are also developing new features and Digg experiences that will encourage participation and discovery of content outside of the home page proper. These changes will contribute to a much broader platform for the Digg community to share and discuss stories.

We are always testing and refining, and welcome your thoughts and feedback.

Thanks,
Anton