Say it ain’t so, Joe!

Of course that’s ridiculous. Something is seriously broken, and I am sure they are desperately trying to fix it. But they have been trying that for an year or two now. I don’t think its the algo. Mods on digg normally mean a bury and disappearance from Upcoming. This is surely an algo weakness.

The new recommendation engine is the likely culprit. Essentially, the end result of it is that the same top digg users who spend all their waking hours on digg get their stories recommended to even more people. And thus you have the same front page, often with more stories by the same guys.

(That is not to say their submissions are not good quality)

Plus, there is a basic issue here. What kind of a network does a digg user need to get the 200 plus stories needed for an FP now? An obsessed digg user, thats who. Normal people can only read and digg now - to get that number of diggs, you have to network like crazy, identify stories which are brilliant before others catch it. How many normal people have 4-5 hours to spare? The end result is that Digg has an elite now - and the elite is stronger and more powerful.

Nothing wrong with that in principle. But does a normal guy with some time stand a chance in Digg now? Definitely not. Perhaps that is what Digg wants.

Not that there is anything wrong with it! As long as we are told thats where Digg is going!

Love that second picture.

O fuck off just because some stupid ass article doesn’t get to the front page once doesn’t mean its broken you idiot it was probably just a glitch who knows but stop crying about it and man the fuck up.

you said in the story “Clearly, a diverse set of Digg users thought this story was important” but you haven’t proven or even attempted to prove that the users who dugg it were in fact diverse. Furthermore, you have even begun to address the number of buries the story has received. You dismissed the stock response they sent you without even reading it. I’m not saying you don’t have a point but you need to counter your opponent’s points to win a debate.

Why are people still using Digg? The comments section is run by morons and their “top stories” have become more and more irrelevant…It’s already been pretty much proven that a small group of users runs things. How is that Democratic?

Reddit is no great shakes, either, but it wipes the map with Digg.

Did it maybe get bumped/buries because the article is barely accessible? I’m at work on a pretty snazzy connection via the University of Michigan, and it’s taken over 2 minutes to load up this page, and the article in question. The images didn’t load. The CSS isn’t loading. Frankly, it looks like your server’s tanking because of too many visitors. Not much point in digg displaying links that really don’t work. That’s a pity, cause the teaser for the article sounded very interesting.

Now if only people could get this ramped up about our government and would speak up like this…

I have been experiencing numerous error messages about things blowing up, when posting to digg. I have also noticed that the “digg it” icon (Java script) often doesn’t work when a story submitted has already been dugg. There is also an erroneous header that appears stating that I dugg the story, but the story never shows up in my profile as having been dugg.

Digg is a strange animal. Censorship? Maybe. But here’s what I think is going on. The bury feature does not require a balance against diggs. For example maybe a story only needs 25 buries to be kept off the front page and doesn’t matter how many diggs it gets. If you look closely on Digg, as time goes on, you see fewer and fewer controversial political stories. Those opposed bury the stories and it doesn’t take much. If you get buried enough it appears you get banned too. It’s a lousy system. Burying should be for spam, not opinions you disagree with.

Maybe you guys should realize just because you think something should be on the Digg front page doesn’t mean it should.

I love stories like these. They’re like delicious little morsels of idiocy.

Look, algorithms aren’t perfect, especially machine learning algorithms like those that digg uses. Given that only one of these shit-fits pops up every month or so and digg gets thousands of submissions a day, I’d say overall the algorithm is doing a pretty incredible job.

If you really want to have a discussion about Digg’s algorithm, I suggest you at the very least read everything Wikipedia has on Machine Learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning) so you don’t sound like a moron.

Digg sucks, Kevin is only in it for the money, when are you people going to realize this? It’s ALL ABOUT MONEY! Christ. Goto reddit.com already, leave digg to the kids.

sad, if true.
i’ll give digg a wide berth if the claims are well founded.
i hope not, but lately i’ve noticed a certain ‘mainstreamism’
creeping into digg. crap like forbes.com, cnn and various strains
of establishment media poisoning the digg waters.

At the time of this writing it is now at the 12k mark.
That’s TWELVE THOUSAND.

of course just now both this story and “The Constitution Dies Tomorrow” stories are gone from the Top in All Topics section. COMPLETELY GONE.

Marcelo says  ::  July 10th, 2008 @ 12:40 pm EST
Really? I just got here form this being the top story.What I do see if babies that they aren’t getting the attention they wanted. Like I said I came here after seeing this on the front page “Top 24 hour” only under 300 Mario comic. lol.. QQ I’m sure this will result in some sort of “digg posted it up after pressure”. The explanation he gave was a valid one, it was just one you didn’t understand. Glad to see you are getting the ntoice you wanted.
Reply to Marcelo  ::  Click to quote this comment

In conclusion, fuck Ron Paul

i used digg for long time, until i discovered a buried story wanting to let people know that the so called burry brigade are none others that the digg administrators themselves. And immediately after, by searching buried stories, i found a lot of stories like that. So i started to search for other sites covering the fact that digg was censuring Ron Paul stories, found some, and submited them on digg. What happened? they got 110-140 very fast, but did not went to the homepage, instead they were buried (by a single administrator bury I assume). then i left digg for good

That Digg link was buried because it moronic. Just like every Obamaton post.

The rating system in Digg is quite often overruled by human moderator(s). I have been following this behaviour for a few years now quite closely as I have been doing my best to get certain really flamey articles on the first page. The best ones have reached couple thousand diggs within an hour, yet never came to the front page. Furthermore, some of my best accomplishes have made it on the front page - to be instantly removed from there by something/someone.

In short, the canned answer that they gave you is 100% bullshit.

This isn’t the first time Equinix commits acts of censorship. http://trentlapinski.com/?p=76
I’m leaving for reddit or somewhere else. It’s really fun to see Digg make your articles disappear from the upcoming section even though they still have more than ten diggs.

a new disenchanted ex-digg user.

Dont be a bitch just because your stupid article didn’t make the front page.

Don’t bitch about it, just because your story didn’t make it to the frontpage, your story is late news. Digg is a free community and if you don’t like that your story didnt make it to front page TOUGH LUCK, thats life

ham^4 says  ::  July 12th, 2008 @ 8:46 pm EST
hah heres the thing: when a story generates 13637 diggs, most in 1 day, it should make it to the front because guess what? its a community! or at least thats the general/supposed idea.
Reply to ham^4  ::  Click to quote this comment

I have a report to track these every week here:
http://owenbyrne.com/category/digg-unpromoted-list/

Easy fix

Greasemonkey script to auto bury top 50 digggers
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/32571

Take digg back … why should we fight for the scraps of the 40% of the Front page? It is just greedy, well if people agree with me, “NO SOUP FOR YOU!” top diggers