As a really huge fan of Digg.com , it is very interesting to know the inner workings of the site.  Since today is MLK day, I have the day off from work and decided to do a little experiment.   I was checking out the Digg Spy feature that we all love so much and I wondered(…and forgive me if this has already been explained by Kevin or a member of the Digg team) how many negative reports does it take to remove a page from the frontpage.

Below, I show an image capture that I took of a story on the frontpage that seemed like “spam” because it had tons of affiliate links and adds.  It was a story titled, “Legality of ALLOFMP3.com EXAMINED!!”  The title alone sounded a bit SPAM-ISH , but it already had over 120 Diggs.  I monitored the Digg Spy feature until I saw that it was no longer on the frontpage.  It took about an hour or so to get removed.  That sounds pretty cool because I counted at least 40 reports that it was “spam” or “just lame”(most likely it was a bit more).   I have to assume that since this article had nearly 300 Diggs when I last remember seeing it on the frontpage, that it must mean that it takes a negative comment ratio of about 15 to 20% of the total Diggs received to actually get booted off of the frontpage.  Since I didn’t view this article from Digg #1, I can only estimate how many negative reports it may have recieved before I started to monitor it.

Since I can’t actually find the link on Digg anymore, I am posting a full page image of a Digg Spy screen here Full Page Digg Spy  .  I looked up the username of the person who is listed on this screen cap on Google and found his profile, but he must have undugg the story because it was no longer part of his profile.

 I did find something strange. I noticed that once the article was removed from the frontpage, for the next ten minutes or so, I would still see it come across Digg Spy. I assumed that maybe a cookie was on my browser that was aware of recent stories that I submitted or reported , so I logged off I went to Digg Spy again.  I still saw the item coming across.  I think that maybe it was because some visitors may have not refreshed their browsers.   

 Once a story is removed from the frontpage, it is also removed from the Digg search.  Does anyone know the reason for this?  I assume it is just another means of filtering out spam.

 This just shows that Digg.com has a very effective way of filtering out spam and useless information.  This is great for people who are only looking for quality news items.  I know that I use Digg nearly everyday and sometimes three or four times a day, so I appreciate the effectiveness of it and look forward to seeing new features as they are released.

*forgive me for using photobuck to host the images.  If this article gets Dugg enough, I will be sure to replace the photobucket images and host them on my own server.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 12:21 am and is filed under Tech, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.