Digg Updates Algorithm

Digg is making updates to its promotional algorithm. The idea is to make the site more useful to more people. A select few have long had the most power over Digg’s content.

"We’re constantly tweaking the Digg algorithm to ensure that a unique and diverse set of Diggs drives the content on the homepage," says Anton Kast on Digg the Blog. "We’ve made a few notable enhancements to our promotional algorithm recently, to ensure that all Diggers have a fair chance at getting their submitted stories promoted to the homepage. We felt it was important to call these out."

Power users have been gaming Digg for quite a while. A common complaint is that the average Digg user barely has a chance to get their submissions as much exposure as the power users.

"In addition to ongoing tweaks, we’ve taken steps to prevent abusive Digging behavior in an effort to improve the quality of content that is promoted to the homepage," says Kast. "Only a very small portion of the Digg community will experience these limits, well under 1%, and the vast majority of folks won’t be affected by them at all."

So how does the algorithm work? According to this video from Digg Community Manager Jen Burton, it has something to do with MC Hammer… Why not?

I have to wonder if this list of most-dugg sites from Hitwise will change. The blog post announcing the updates has less than a thousand diggs at the time of this writing. As one commenter points out, it wasn’t submitted by a power user.