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Digg the Blog

Digg 2008: A Look BackJanuary 2

Hey everyone,

I’m sure you’ll all agree that 2008 was a crazy year, so I thought I would take a moment to recap some Digg highlights. Our traffic has nearly doubled to more than 35 Million visitors per month, and we now receive more than 20,000 story submissions per day. We worked hard to continue to make improvements to the site, many of which were directly based on feedback from you.
Some highlights include:

- Site enhancements and new features, like the improved Comments system and the Recommendation Engine
- Digg Dialogg series, where we posed your questions to notable leaders such as Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore
- New ways to discover Digg content; including the new mobile version of Digg, Twitter feeds, Google gadget, and Firefox toolbar
- Quarterly Townhalls and in-person Meetups; we held events in Austin, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Denver, St. Paul and London
- New ways to track election news and interact with politic

Dupes & ongoing updates to Digg’s promotional algorithmDecember 30 2008

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

New Twitter feeds!December 23 2008

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/p

Digg: New Story Page ImprovementsDecember 18 2008

Hey all,

We’re always looking for opportunities to improve the delivery of relevant and interesting content on Digg. Over the next few days, we’ll be rolling out changes to the design of the individual story pages. The new design will feature related stories based on keywords and a list of top stories with the same topic as the story you’re viewing. The goal is to make it even easier to discover great content on Digg.

These new features are in beta and we’ll be testing and making iterations to them over the coming weeks. Expect quirky results as we release this into the wild, but fear not, we are continuously improving the back-end logic. Look for improvements over the next several weeks and months.

In a previous post on the Technology blog, Joe Stump went into detail about the recent underlying changes to the Digg code infrastructure. We’re bringing the same principles of flexibility and modular composition to the design of Digg’s story pages.

The design changes we’ve made are driven by what we hear from you, the Digg community. When developing new features, and continuing our refinement of existing ones, we perform several rounds of user testing. That means sitting down with folks ranging from the most avid Digger to novice Internet users and watching how they interact with the site. You’ll see more changes in the months ahead, so as always, please let us know what you think!

Sl

How Obama Helped Digg Fix BugsNovember 21 2008

A historic moment in history has occurred with the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States. For many, this moment was shared with the digg community that included a furious level of digging and commenting. In fact, election night generated the most traffic and activity in the history of Digg.

At about 8pm PST, most TV networks called the election with Obama as winner. Some interesting stats for the 8pm hour (PST):
Submitting was 108% of normal.
Digging was 202% of normal.
Burying was 137% of normal.
Commenting was 278% of normal.
Comment Digging was 619% of normal.
Comment Burying was 689% of normal.

Note the resulting traffic on one of our DB chains:


Wow. Talk about making the DBAs sweat. If you were on digg at this time you might have noticed a couple of annoying issues. Logging in wasn’t pleasant. Page load times were longer than usual. Digging was… a bit… unresponsive, submitting a new story may have been prone to failure.

If you recall the previous blog from our lead DBA timeless, you’ll remember we have a concept of ’selectors’ where developers will select a pool and purpose f