W Revenue dot ComDouble Your Site’s Revenue - Scott Wainner on Web Business

Brilliant, I like the idea. I know all the popular stuff should be on there but I could never come out with an idea of how everyone can be “dugg.”

This post deserves to be “dugg” if it hasn’t been already.

Maybe you should make this suggestion to Blogging Zoom? I know they are interested in improving.

Or you could use something like NewzNozzl, which aggregates and does meta-voting (which should, in theory, reduce that clutter on the upcoming stories)

talk about link baiting…(digg baiting)

So I was going to smack the above poster for spam until I looked at the site – cool idea, I think – a actual new take on the whole vote-on-news thing?

(And WTF is up with misspelling domain names? News is spelled with a freakin’ S, ok? And note the “e” on Nozzle, EH?)

For Digg, I’d think that getting rid of the friends list would be help, for this - and maybe even not show who submitted the story in the first place? Or hide it until a certain amount of time passed?

[…] hope pligg can use the same suggestion in the article to improve pligg also. What do you guy think? Hey Digg: Your “Upcoming” Model Blows, Here’s How to Fix It | W Revenue dot Com __________________ To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 0 or greater. […]

Besides what is suggested in the article, I think all users should remain anonymous. That would end a lot of the crap right away.

Good idea … I’ll implement it on haha.com … a social-content aggregator site.

i notice this after beening on digg for a month
“In essense, Digg is a simple popularity contest”
well it’s popularity contest that makes that digg’ed site alot of money.
it’s always about the money.
always.
that will never change.

Good suggestion and visual, Scott. You also have an impressive looking background. Just subscribed to your blog.

This is a good idea, except for the the fact that it ensures a flood of spam. Can you imagine how much utter crap would get posted if it could be *guaranteed* 500 views?

Maybe a more effective solution would be to provide an incentive to look through upcoming stories. For example, maybe users who do this could be given digg.com email addresses and storage space, or… something.

You can also use the Digg Noise Filter to help find valuable upcoming stories…

http://www.thegooglecache.com/digg-noise-filter.php

Yeah Digg is indeed a complete popularity contest. he with the most friends wins, simple as that.

I mean theoretically people like Zaibatsu on Digg can get anything they want on the front page. They can have millions of people thinking something is honest to goodness frontpage worthy and in dire need of being emailed out to friends and family JUSTbecause it made front page of Digg, so hey, it MUST be important right?

Shit needs to change.

This idea posted here though I forgot to mention really isn’t the “cat’s ass” either, however. I mean theres a ton of useless spam submitted to the site, and for submissions like that to even get a chance to be seen by people…Just no.

Honestly, what should be done is that once per day you MUST go to an upcoming page in any category and digg or bury at least 10 articles. The diggs / buries must not happen too fast either to prevent people from digging/ burying anything.

Once you’ve done that then you can be allowed to once again view the main Digg homepage.

I agree.

Dig makes it obvious stories voted and submitted by friends. The shout feature also is a great tool to alert your friends to vote your stories. In spite of all the digg shortvomings, most of the good stores are promoted to the homepage. Only a few interesting stores drop off from the list.

Great idea. At the same time, Digg is also one of the most popular sites on the internet. That by itself must say something about its users being pleased with the way it currently runs. Sure, some people (a lot?) are getting trampled over by the “popular” submitters. Meh…I don’t know. I guess I’m neutral but I do think you’re suggest is a good one.

– Karim Baz

If you do not vote (digg), your analysis of digg.com system is not as credible as one that will view and vote (digg) on stories. If you do not like the way digg works than goto another site or at least digg some upcoming stories.

I think this is a great idea. I’ve never even considered submitting a story to Digg because I know it’d never get anywhere… this would make it worth it.

Another good idea would be to show stories to users based on they types of stories they have “dugg” or viewed the most in the past. Maybe have half the posts on the front page would show the most popular/dugg stories and the other half would be based on what they think the user might be interested in. I could care less about flipping through the upcoming stories. Digg has to do something on the front page to help the “average” user digg upcoming stories, otherwise it will always be a popularity contest.

Or Digg could simply abandon the friend network and make all Diggs anonymous.

Warren: You have the answer. The obvious solution is to NOT show who posted the article until it has been sufficiently up/dn modded.

Hiding the submitter’s name isn’t going to fix the problem though. The problem is that Digg has grown so large, into such an important “tool” for marketers, that the Upcoming tab is filled with junk — too much junk for anyone to sift through. That junk is overshadowing the quality stories, ensuring that those stories will never receive enough diggs to get promoted unless the submitter asks friends to digg it.

You do not have to roam around digg website to find news to digg! The chief idea is that as people surf the web, they find something interesting they can digg it. If many people are finding same story interesting, it automatically ranks up.

That’s why when you attempt to dig a story Digg shows similar stories already ‘Dugg’. You should then select one of those if it matches your story in essence. It maybe from a different news-site but if the news is same, you should go ahead and increase the rank of a previously submitted story rather than introduce a new one of your own.

**In this way, at the time reading an article on the web and selecting it for Digg you remain oblivious of its current rank in Digg and the emergent ranking therefore correctly reflects the social popularity of the news/event.**

In the end, you would ofcourse go to digg (but not specifically for digg-ing stories but to view other interesting stories people are submitting.

If everyone were to find stories to be ‘dugg’ from digg itself, it would become a closed system. No new stories would get generated. :-). Thanks to genuine web-farers @digg, this does not happen.

There is a massive ratio of sites that fail to get in to those that make it, so if they made sure that all submissions got 500 views each they’d have to show loads and loads of garbage, and everyone who posts a story to Digg would be guaranteed an audience which they probably don’t deserve.

Diggnation’s biggest problem is stagnation. Parts of Digg are about as interesting and predictable as watching grass grow. It’s a shame to see the same proclivity of headlines languish for hours on Digg’s topic ‘frontpages’, while more popular stories (sometimes by a factor of 2!) often get immediately mobbed and die premature deaths, buried in the upcoming queue merely because their bury threshold was reached too quickly compared to their competitors. Impulsive, politically-belligerent diggers who frequent the site exploit this temporal disparity to rule the roost and lock out any opposing views. A real travesty. Digg is NOT an equal opportunity provider.

The evidence is on the story page, where comment thread diggs function quite differently than they do on the homepage/upcoming main pages. Here comments may indeed be hidden (depending on a user’s settings), but — here’s the kicker — they are never removed from the page entirely. What’s more, comments also have a greater time of exposure, and even ‘buried’ comments may still linger on visible to users with low thresholds. The result: very often a story which slants in one direction will have in its thread an opposing viewpoint as its most popular comment! (ridiculously, this opposing comment sometimes can attract nearly as many Diggs as the story itself!) Yet astonishingly users almost never see stories which share that same extraordinarily-popular opposing viewpoint make it to the homepage. Strange.

So the fact is, Digg’s system is vulnerable to mobbing. I think Digg’s employees have REALLY got to put an end this. I don’t know exactly how. Maybe they could use Scott’s idea, or maybe they could try something else entirely, like make the weight of a digger’s “digg” inversely proportional to the number of votes cast by that user since the story’s time of submission (this is the voting frequency). This means the user’s next vote’s weight would inch upward (towards a limit of 1) as the seconds tick by after his previous vote. This would penalize the junkies for being rash and impulsive.

Furthermore, ideally a story ‘made popular’ ought to remain popular for a set period, even if numerically it’s ready to be culled. This might give more regular folks a chance to vote on a good story before it’s vaporized by junkies. Then, once it has been culled, the ‘upcoming stories’ page really needs to be a TWO COLUMN page BY DEFAULT, with ‘latest’ on one half and ‘most popular’ on the other. Because as it stands right now, buried stories just VANISH and thus never have the opportunity to catch up to their competition. And so in this way Digg’s bury algorithm is acting as a one-way barrier. It’s like the drunken old man who staggers his way down a sidewalk going home from the bar — he’s got a 100% chance of ending up in the gutter, because even though his wavering is random, the wall remains fixed to one side of him!

And lastly, because of the cruelty of time, stories briefly popular but buried unusually quickly (mobbed by junkies) ought to receive some quantity of ‘rescue diggs’ for a period after they’ve been buried, the frequency of these being inversely proportional to the story’s submission time, such as (1-t)+10), and with duration based on some sort of decreasing logarithmic scale, like -10logt+1 or something. Call it Digg welfare if you want, but the place is starving for some diversity of thought.

Great idea

Why do you think Kevin Rose has a 100 percent success rate?

Sorry, Scott,

but I think your solution is LAME.

Using Digg’s general architecture, I would suggest something more along the lines of:

1. look at percentage of first 10 diggs coming from friends (OK, this would probably be high since they’re watching this stuff more than others)

2. look at the timing of the first 10 diggs

3. disable any user account if the user has been known to “ask” for diggs (or at least disable their “posting” rights)

4. study the patterns of the first 100 diggs

5. after the first 100 diggs, further diggs might actually be detrimental — too populist, too sensational, too britney spears etc. (so I would set a limit somewhere, and then look at WHO is actually digging it — how RELIABLE those diggs are, and/or if their just “1 in a million” diggs)

Just some BASIC ideas — for something more sophisticated, you’ll have to pay me money for my advice! ;P

nmw

I digg upcoming stories. I bury spam and marketing crap.

Digg could make the site better by returning to the old method where when you searched a username, you could bury all their stories from the results page. The recent change now requires you to open the digg page for each story before you can bury it.

It was much more efficient to search a spammer name and bury en masse than it is now.

Perhaps a spam squad? a group of differs who could view users with a threshold of buried stories to determine if the poster is a spammer who could then suspend that username? or even better, all ow them to continue posting, but auto-bury their stories?

The level of spam, marketing, and business/stock pr stories is rapidly climbing out of control.

Wow I submitted this to digg and it’s now over 1275. This is the first time I have ever had a popular story.

i’ve thought of that idea too, but there’s a flaw to that idea too..

let’s say digg receives in average a chunk of 10, or 5, links per minute..
There’s a chance that a few *good* stories be left out during peak times.. hope you get the point.. (lack of creative words..)

that idea is prone to mobbing too..

do digg filters out duplicate submissions, or at least nearly identical ones?

use reddit and you wont have this problem

Thanks

“but I think your solution is LAME.”

And your solution is overly complex and misses the point. Your solution tries to fix the problem of friends digging stories. My solution aims to fix the problem of quality content languishing in the upcoming section and that is never seen or promoted, because there’s so much crap there and not enough people looking at it. That’s the problem with digg: that good stories go unpromoted in the upcoming section and the only stuff that gets promoted is being manually promoted by shouts, requests to friends, etc.

You could submit a real story about aliens landing on the white house lawn and it would get 1 maybe 2 diggs because no one will ever see it, UNLESS you send it to 50 friends.

“let’s say digg receives in average a chunk of 10, or 5, links per minute.. There’s a chance that a few *good* stories be left out during peak times..”

Not really, because digg has so much traffic. It could start immediately spotlighting new stories on popular pages. Ultimately it just needs to be sure that a large enough sample of people have seen each upcoming story and had an opportunity to digg it or bury it, because there are not enough eyeballs looking at stories in the upcoming section.

I like you idea but the major problem i see is the shear number of stories submitted would either overwhelm the front page stories or need to be dispersed (thinly) over multiple page views that there would be no benefit, i.e. the upcoming story’s diggs would still pale to the friends/manual promotion method. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, so perhaps i am wrong. i do like the idea an lot i just have some mathematical reservations.

I would prefer to see some sort of “suggest friends” feature. This idea is inspired by thoof (which is not as good as i had hoped it would be). Essentially, digg would compare stories one has dugg and compare it to others. At a set percentage of similarity and/or ordered by most similar, digg would list the “suggested friends”, at which point the user would choose to add or not add the suggested friend.

Of course, these ideas for improvement are not mutually exclusive. And could have some interesting effects if combined (assuming the “featured upcoming stories” appear on the friends recent activity page also…because, ideally, that is where I would spend most of my time).

Personally, I’d rather see upcoming stories on the middle right of the page, directly underneath the “Top 10 in All Topics” area of the page.

I got so frustrated with Digg’s shout system that I disabled it. I was getting about 30-50 shouts per day from the same diggers. Don’t these diggers have a job?

That’s a great idea! Not only that, but you could also add a spot for the article that got the most diggs within the last hour. Basically the fastest rising digg.

Jessie

I like the blog , please update it

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I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read.