Hi all,

We’re constantly tweaking the Digg algorithm to ensure that a unique and diverse set of Diggs drives the content on the homepage.  We’ve made a few notable enhancements to our promotional algorithm recently, to ensure that all Diggers have a fair chance at getting their submitted stories promoted to the homepage. We felt it was important to call these out.

In addition to ongoing tweaks, we’ve taken steps to prevent abusive Digging behavior in an effort to improve the quality of content that is promoted to the homepage. Only a very small portion of the Digg community will experience these limits, well under 1%, and the vast majority of folks won’t be affected by them at all.

There may be a few subtle promotion dynamics as we release this logic into the wild, but fear not, our team is making adjustments real time. As always, let us know what you think and keep the feedback coming.

Thanks,
Anton

PS: For an insider peek into how the algorithm works, check out Digg’s Community Manager Jen Burton, as she provides investigative insight on the inner-workings of the infamous Digg Algorithm. Special thanks to Hammer in his cameo role.

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

Hey all –

We’re super stoked to announce that we’ve created Twitter feeds across several Digg topics, so you can get popular stories delivered right to Twitter. This provides another way to customize the types of stories you receive from Digg. The Twitter feeds will update as stories become popular, so when, say, a new story about green technology gets promoted to the Digg homepage, the Digg environment Twitter feed will post to your stream. These feeds were created using the Twitter API and are kept active by the likes of you.

We’ve created several official Digg news feeds, so hopefully there’s something for every Twitter enthusiast:

Digg Homepage updates as every new story is promoted

Digg 2000 : Stories that reach 2,000 or more Diggs

Technology: Popular stories from Digg.com/technology

Apple: Popular stories from Digg.com/apple

Software: Popular stories from Digg.com/software

World & Business: Popular stories from Digg.com/world_business

Political News: Popular stories from Digg.com/politics

Science: Popular stories from Digg.com/science

Environment: Popular stories from Digg.com/environment

Offbeat: Popular stories from Digg.com/offbeat

Gaming: Popular stories from Digg.com/gaming

Images: Popular images from Digg.com/images

Video: Popular videos from Digg.com/video

Entertainment: Popular stories from Digg.com/entertainment

Sports: Popular stories from Digg.com/sports

As always, let us know what you think. Of course, don’t forget to check out Digg updates on Twitter for other news and announcements!

Have a good one,
Jen

Hey all –

Digg enforces its Terms of Use so that Digg remains a vibrant community of people committed to sharing and discovering great content. Everyone who uses Digg agrees to abide by the TOU, which maintains a positive experience on Digg for all community members by prohibiting spam, porn, gaming, hate speech etc.

In many cases, Digg gives users who violate the TOU a second and sometimes even a third chance. When people continue to violate the TOU, or where a first-time violation is egregious, Digg is reluctantly left with no option but to ban the user.

A couple weeks ago we posted a blog entry regarding script usage, reminding members of the community that it violates the Digg TOU. We also rolled out some changes that warned users when unnatural Digging activity was detected. Since this post, we analyzed our logs on a regular basis to clearly identify script use over an extended period of time.

While we never speak to specific instances of user bans to protect the privacy of individual users, we have banned a small number of users for script use over the past several weeks. Some of them are active users that are well known within the Digg Community. While we’ll sincerely miss the contributions of these individuals and are never happy about playing policeman, we believe that the larger Digg community is adversely impacted by people who choose to violate the TOU.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@digg.com with questions or feedback. We’re continuously researching and investigating this process, so don’t be shy and let us know what you think.

Have a good one,
Jen

Hey all,

We’re growing up so fast…sort of. Today we launched two new official Digg Blogs: Community (this one) and Technology. We’ll still use our main blog for big news and other important announcements, but because we love you and you love us, we thought we’d add a few new sections to keep you in the know.

We leave you with a little glimpse of some of the people here at the Digg offices. We have crooning QA Managers, Product Managers with crabs and a little secret about what really powers the Digg Recommendation Engine. We are calling this video series ‘Safe for Work.’ Hope you like the first installment.

Keep an eye on this space, more to come!

- Jen