Whenever I talk to someone about Digg, each person seems to have a different number of how many Diggs it takes to hit the homepage. Most feel that once you get to 60 you’re pretty much assured the homepage (assuming that your story doesn’t get buried along the way). Sometimes you can get up to 90 or so and still be in Upcoming.
Well today I saw something that I had never seen before – a story with 186 Diggs that was still in the Upcoming News section.
As you can see this story was up to 186 Diggs before being made popular. Once it hit 187 – it made the homepage:
In all my time on Digg I have never seen a story with this many Diggs still stuck in Upcoming. Typically when you have that many Diggs your story would have made the homepage already. So what could be the reasoning behind this?
a) Digg could be shaking things up a bit. From time to time – stories might need more votes before they are made popular.
b) This was a controversial story – there might have been such a quick & even distribution of Diggs and Buries that they were basically cancelling eachother out – thus once the Diggs beat the buries – it made the homepage.
c) This particular Digg user, AdimiralAdama, had three stories in a row in Upcoming. One had just been made Popular and one was sitting right behind it and all of the stories were political in nature. This could have just been a way to put a little diversity in what was being made popular without burying.
d) It was just a fluke.
Are we looking at a new part of the Digg algorithm or am I just looking at this too closely?
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5 Responses to “186 Diggs and Still in Upcoming?”
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Yes, I noticed this same thing today and thought it very strange. I actually think your choice B explains it best.
Very strange.
Not so strange. Here’s another with almost 600:
http://digg.com/political_opinion/Diggbats_Enforcing_the_Groupthink
Also, I’ve seen evidence that the ‘bury’ counts for -10 while a ‘digg’ is only +1
I had one of my posts make the front page of Netscape but it didn’t budge on Digg. The only significant difference I could see was that the first commenter on Digg said it was ‘lame’.
There definitely is a momentum on Digg that would be worth analyzing. Negative comment affects, acceleration, time of day, day of the week, having a digg button on your site, who submitted, etc.
To tell you the truth, I think it’s actually a very random system and not useful at all. I rarely find any of my info on Digg. Great stories are awesome buried.
Doug –
I often forget to visit Digg and I’m not a big fan of the comment threads over there. But you can’t deny the traffic benefits if your site gets dugg. In my experience nothing compares.