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Digg In the Future 54

Posted by samzenpus from the I-thought-there-would-be-more-sparkles dept.
jamie writes "A new site called Digg In The Future - created by 17-year-old high-school student Raj Vir as a research project - says that its algorithm can predict with 63-percent accuracy what shared links are going to make it to the front page of the Digg website. (Does it allow for brigades?)"
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Digg In the Future More

Digg In the Future

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  • Would be useless for ./ (Score:3, Funny)

    by Pseudonym Authority ( 1591027 ) on Thursday August 26, 2010 @03:33AM (#33378386)
    You don't need any software to know that this story will be posted twice.

  • In a self-fulfilling prophecy... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by oiron ( 697563 ) on Thursday August 26, 2010 @03:34AM (#33378388) Homepage

    Did it predict that the article on it would be on top of Digg?

  • Just redirect it to reddit.com

    • Yeah their comment system looks usable. The comment system on digg OTH looks like they decided to have a comment system but set out to make it as ugly and useless as they possibly could, and more than likely put a lot of effort into it too.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I can predict that this story will be one of those reaching digg front page (maybe it already did, but digg is too broken atm for me to go there and check it out)
  • I don't need no stinking algorithm to tell me that 95.1189% of "stories" posted on slashdot are crock of shit.
  • Could also say a 37% inaccuracy. The numbers don't differ that much. They seem closer to guessing than to certainty.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Buggz ( 1187173 )

      Could also say a 37% inaccuracy. The numbers don't differ that much. They seem closer to guessing than to certainty.

      If we're talking about large amounts of data (I imagine we are) it's actually significant, law of great numbers and such. Considering a random guess leaves you at 50%, it proves his algorithm actually does something.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by maxume ( 22995 )

        It's actually a lot better than that, there isn't a 50% chance that each article on the internet will end up on Digg (well, at least not the front page).

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Buggz ( 1187173 )
          A random guess would be 50% correct because the only two options are yes or no.

          Consider a sample of 100 articles, of which only 10 hit the front page. Guessing randomly I will have predicted a correct "yes" on about 5 of them, and a wrong "no" on the other 5. Of the 90 discarded articles I will have predicted a wrong "yes" on 45 items and a correct "no" on the other 45. Thus I have 45+5=50 correct predictions and 45+5=50 wrong predictions out of 100.

          If there are 3 options a random guess is just over 33

  • This thing probably just scours the internet for these keywords in stories:

    Obama
    Apple, Mac, iPad, iPod, Macbook
    Marijuana
    Obama
    Police
    Linux
    Sex
    Westboro
    Funny picture, cat picture
    Obama

  • it's dead jim (Score:4, Informative)

    by crossmr ( 957846 ) on Thursday August 26, 2010 @04:46AM (#33378662) Journal

    I assume it'll be a lot less stories. The new digg revamp is absolutely terrible. It's impenetrable. Most of the useful features before are gone, it's half broken, with comments not loading, or links to your own comments not working. It shows you basically none of the information it showed you before, the new main feed is completely out to lunch. Apparently the "most recent" story on digg was submitted 2 days ago, and I know I saw it on the front page yesterday since they busted it. So digg is telling me since the upgrade, no one has made any story popular.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
      Digg is the classic case of a site that started out kind of useful and interesting. But it quickly got way too much press and hype, then subsequently expanded itself into something that tries to be everything to everyone--and lost its focus and value in the process. The comments at Digg have always been pretty lame compared to more mature sites like slashdot (and here you thought you'd never see "mature" and "slashdot" in the same sentence). But it was a pretty good place for tech articles before they start

    • Since end of 2005, I was a big Digger until yesterday's v4 release to production. I even got a free T-shirt for getting 300 stories promoted/vote up onto its home page. They didn't even change anything from others' and my feedbacks. I asked support about being to filter categories (e.g., World News and Politics), but they said it doesn't exist. No upcoming, no following, can't show 100 comments per load, etc. Well, frak that.

      Why can't they keep the old design for old school users like /. did? If /. didn't h

  • First setup a site that dispays random digg entries with "digg it" links, name it "digg in the future" and get some publicity. As the stories displayed get more diggs, your site gets accuracy > 50% even if selecting random entries.

  • So... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cybrodroid ( 1842676 ) on Thursday August 26, 2010 @05:06AM (#33378752)
    it scans reddit?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z8 ( 1602647 )
      Basically, yes. From TFA:

      Vir says that since many of the links that make it to the front page of the site have already been shared on other social networks, the Digg In The Future software looks at frequently shared URLs from Twitter and gives those added weight.

  • Because that seems to predict what Digg will do in the future too.

    • Because that seems to predict what Digg will do in the future too.

      with a much higher percentage than 63%, I'll bet...

  • Observing disturbs the observed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pinkushun ( 1467193 ) on Thursday August 26, 2010 @07:29AM (#33379338) Journal

    ... factors taken into consideration are what I like to call “power submitters” ... and “power diggers”... The algorithm also relies on other factors, Vir says, including the time of day (since stories submitted in the early morning hours are unlikely to reach the front page) and whether the link comes from “preferred” sites that appeal to Digg users

    If people adapt their submission procedure to increase their chance of it reaching front page, it will drop the algorithm's accuracy initially, as submitters that don't fit the user profile suddenly match the 'best submission time criteria'.

    The curve will then level out, and climb again, eventually increasing the algorithm's accuracy beyond the initial point as more people conform to the best criteria.

  • Not after their MeTooBook redesign. /checking out reddit

  • Digg seems to be heavily slanted towards news that falls into the "odd/strange" category and whatever useless viral videos happen to be hottest at the moment. It's the top-40 station of news sites, and it doesn't surprise me much that what will be posted on Digg can be easily predicted by looking at other social networking sites.

  • The comments won't load. They also try too hard to make it like twitter(following newsfeeds, etc). It lost any unique charm it once had.

  • if (poster == "MrBabyMan") { return 100.0; }

    And wow, I just checked their "front page" for the first time in a couple of months. This is not even the Digg I knew that I barely cared about any more.

  • Digg just completely revamped its site, basically killing Digg brigades and turning itself into a giant RSS feed.
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