

Digg Changes Algorithm: No More Group Voting Up Stories - aston
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/23/digg-changes-algorithm-no-more-group-voting-up-stories/

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aston
Interesting mostly in a meta way.

Did it ever make sense to have voting circles mean more than diversified
voting on the site? If I had to choose an initial bias, I'd choose the latter.
News.YC chooses neither, I guess.

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rms
So was group voting actually favorably weighted on Digg?

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Leon
The article seems to suggest that there was no preference one way or the other
previously, but that larger groups still up-voted stories together, which
influenced the diversity of the site towards them more than was wanted by
everyone.

For example, there is a strong ron paul supporting group of people that use
that site, and their voice is drowning out the rest of the audience. A few
hundred vocal ron paul supporters are all that are needed to over influence
the thousands+ that visit the site. Now it sounds like they're checking for
diversity of friend groups to ensure that the most popular stories are the
stories most popular amongst the most diverse amount of people will float to
the top.

Then again this is all speculation, and I still think it could be a better
algorithm.

As for the worries of the Drill Down show, there will probably always be
problems with spammers and fraudulent stories on social sites like that, it's
just a race of AI development on both sides of the site.

