It looks like Digg has made a major update to their algorithm. Stories now need a lot more Diggs before they are promoted to the front page.
In the past, I had my stories hit the front page with as little as 22 Diggs to as many as 42 Diggs. However, now it seems that number has increased to 60 or more. In the above screen shot of all upcoming stories, you can see the current top upcoming story has over 60 Diggs but is still not on the front page yet. I first noticed the change this afternoon when I submitted this story. It is at 53 Diggs and it is still in the waiting area. I have never had story goes for this many Diggs without hitting the front page.
On the good news side of things, requiring more Diggs to hit the front page means the front page has slowed down. That means all the stories on the front page stays there longer. Digg was moving very fast because of the sheer number of stories hitting the front page. There have been times where I had a story hit the front page and then it’s on page 2 in less than an hour. Now a front page story will enjoy an even bigger Digg Effect.
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Well, was about time. The memory of Digg is way too short; sometimes you find the same story like five times in just 20 pages – which is the weakness of Digg if you ask me…
Are you trying to reach frontpage with this article?
LOL…
Wish you all the best.
It’s about time they did something like this.
I still have to wonder: if someone who is tagged as a friend Diggs one of your stories, does their vote count less?
Digg should also have some sort of preview feature for upcomming stories on the home page to get people to look at them. I know they have the link but… Some people are too lazy for even that!
In the end it has no changing effect i think. Because your story will end up longer on the frontpage once it gets on. So instead of 1 story ends up 6 hours on frontpage and getting some nice traffic for you..
than 3 stories that gut up on frontpage for about 1 hour each.
I have to do some research to in the Digg world
There has been a lot of speculation about Digg’s algorithms in the past. I know it takes more than just the number of diggs to get to the front page. There have been times when I’ve seen stories with 20 or so diggs make it to the front while other stories have 50 or more and are still on the upcoming list.
While I can’t confirm, it has been said that your user status also plays into the algorithm. In other words, those who submit more stories and have more ‘friends’ get a boost in the algorithm.
Regardless, it would be nice if the front page slowed down a bit. What is worse is that I’ve been on say page 2 and reading a story that was dug and when I go to page three half of page 2 has now become page 3 because they have all moved down so quickly.
Wrong again. Robert’s got the right idea here. I don’t know the exact algorithm either, but I’m pretty sure the main factor is inflow rate of new stories. They try to keep at least a certain amount of front page stories coming in, so the page automatically lowers the threshold sometimes. I still don’t understand why they didn’t program Digg to remember your position when reading stories! It’s the most annoying thing and extremely simple to fix.
Another option for Digg would be to increase the number of stories that appear on the front page. Once a story jumps to page 2, the linked site loses almost all traffic instantly. The front page count is currently at 15 articles, it would be very interesting if they increased it to 30 and configured the left navigation menu column for auto follow.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/03/top-digg-users-feeling-snubbed/
think this explains it all… nice post at tech crunch