April 15, 2008...8:38 am
Kevin Rose Offers Insight into Digg Algorithm
During this past week’s Diggnation podcast, Kevin Rose offered up some insight into the Digg algorithm which may or may not be the most eye-opening of revelations. It’s something that I figured out pretty quickly and that is that there is an element of time associated with how likely a submitted story is to be promoted to the homepage. Personally, I think there is a 24 hour window of opportunity as I’ve seen stories make it to the “Hot” list (at the right of this page, for example) and not be promoted to the homepage, yet be removed from this list after a full 24 hours.
What I haven’t been able to confirm is whether or not something older than 24 hours could possibly be promoted with an adequate number of diggs despite its age. Kevin’s comment: “It’s too old. The algo won’t promote it.” (skip ahead to 22:30 to hear it) sort of confirms that any submission beyond an age specified by the algorithm won’t be made popular. The story in question (related to SEO by strange coincidence), SEO Design Rap, only had 122 Diggs as of 4/4/08, when the podcast was taped. As of the time of this blog post, it has 261 diggs, most likely a result of promotion via the podcast. This number of diggs should have been enough to promote it to the homepage, but as per Kevin’s comment, age of the submission hasn’t allowed it to be promoted. It was originally submitted to Digg back on 3/20/08.
Although it’s hard to say what the time limitations are within the algorithm, I’m sticking with the 24 hour limit. This basically does confirm that it’s nearly impossible to get something promoted that’s at least a day old, no matter how many diggs it collects.
3 Comments
April 15, 2008 at 9:37 am
Wow, so unless you’re getting mad diggs on the day of submission, then you’ve a snowball’s chance in hell of getting to the front page? I’d say that’s a little too strict and skews too much towards news drivel. I think that’s ironic because sometimes the best news is stuff that is hard to find and actually had been passed over by people…hence by digging it, it can receive the popularity it truly deserves. You’d end up top heavy with articles that are light on content, but had the benefit of simply being there first, wouldn’t you?
April 16, 2008 at 6:32 pm
This is really old news … you could have asked any top Digger and they would have told you: 99.9% of submits that make the front do it in 24 hours … very rarely does something make it after that. Didn’t need to cite the podcast for this info …
April 20, 2008 at 12:43 am
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