Neothoughts

Good news, everyone. Soon we wont have to select which category a story goes in when submitting to Digg.

I posted a story on Digg yesterday for the first time in what feels like forever. You can check it out here. Oh wait, no you can’t. Why? Because it’s topic changed without warning.

I emailed their support staff immediately after noticing that the story had changed topics, asking them if they could correct the problem and asking how this could happen.

They have always been great at replying to my inquiries and this was no exception. They replied that they could not change its topic. They also noted that stories automatically change topic when users bury them for being in the wrong topic.

This seemed really strange to me. There is no way for users to indicate which topic they think a story actually belongs in when burying it for being in the wrong topic, except perhaps by commenting in the discussion thread (no one did so in my submission). Would Digg have me believe that if enough people bury any story for being in the wrong topic, it will be moved to the Political Opinion topic (the topic mine was moved to)?

I followed up asking for clarification on how the Wrong Topic burial feature works and if all stories reported as Wrong Topic were moved to Political Opinion. What I received back from them blew me away: “an algorithm will automatically sort it out and move it to the correct category.”

Astonishing. Digg has an algorithm that can distinguish between news and opinion, comedy video and people video, apple content and baseball content. Why they aren’t trumpeting this amazing technology is beyond me. It could streamline web-based news in a way that has not been achieved before!

Naturally, I replied asking for more details on how a story is filtered, wanting to know if there’s anything I can do while submitting to make it easier for the system to determine it. I don’t expect to get a reply from them since it gets more into their “secret sauce”, but I will update this post if anything comes of it.

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