The Digg Blog

Best of Digg: February Comments

February is a short month, but there was no shortage of sass in Digg comments last month. Let’s get straight to the handful of users who kept us at Digg HQ smiling during an otherwise rainy, gray month in San Francisco.

The Jay/Conan battle may have calmed down, but among Digg users the rancor hasn’t subsided. So it was no surprise that Team Coco was quick to turn news of their TV hero’s new Twitter account into an epic Jay-bashing session.

Touching on the Eubanks comment in the example above, we really appreciated the gigantic circle spotlighting why exactly we should find this image submission funny, as did the commenter below. We more genuinely appreciated the string of sarcasm that followed.

It’s impossible to accurately express the awesomeness of this string of comments in a screenshot, but it’s definitely worth checking out the whole thing. Here’s a peak at the commenter love that followed this masterpiece:

In this example, we see that Digg users work hard for their comment lulz, even busting out Photoshop to add to the conversation. Head over to the permalink and click around for the full effect.

Finally, this short but sweet zinger,, in response to a submission about Nickelback singer Chad Kroeger’s supposed opposition to a Facebook group about why his band sucks it hard, is not just a lol moment for many of us. You could go so far as to say it’s a rallying cry for all fans of music that doesn’t make you wanna bash your head against a wall.

Bonus: This isn’t about the comments, but rather a comment-focused submission from our friends at Funny or Die. Check out their video tracing the origin of a one-liner we’ve seen repeated on Digg one or two times: that’s what she said. And, as if the above examples aren’t enough to convince you that Digg users are awesome, the fine folks at Regretful Morning singled out the Digg community, featuring a take on a ditty we found particularly amusing in January. Bangin’, y/n?

Thanks to all the users who contribute funny, entertaining comments to Digg every day. We love your feedback, so hit us with any questions or comments by going to http://digg.com/contact or reach out via Twitter: @digg_community

Hasta pronto,
T.J.

Hi Everyone,

Digg Ads have been live on the site for just over four months now, and I thought it would be a good time to explain them in a little more depth and update folks on how they’re doing.

What are Digg Ads?

Digg Ads are the ads that you see with other stories on the homepage, or just below the story description on a permalink. The placement on the homepage is currently the third story down from the top; DiggAds look and feel just like regular content, but they are marked as “Sponsored by [Advertiser Name]”. You can Digg or bury them just like any other story but, unlike standard Digging and burying, your feedback affects the price the advertiser pays and how often the ad gets shown. Basically, the more Diggs an ad gets, the less that advertiser will pay overall. This model encourages advertisers to give us great content that’s relevant to the community.

How Do Digg Ads Work?

We charge advertisers on a Performance CPC (Cost per Click) basis where the advertiser tells us the most they will pay for a click on the ad, and we charge them a fluctuating rate for that click without ever exceeding their maximum. The exact rate depends on that ad’s quality score (how many Diggs and buries it has received) and the market rate, which is determined by the DiggAds auction.

The DiggAds Auction:

The DiggAds auction is a complex system designed by some of our math PhDs, but here is a simplified version of how it works: Advertisers tell us the maximum that they want to pay per click by giving us a “bid.” Each day we take those bids and apply a quality score to them based on how the Digg community likes the ads. Then we figure out how much ad space we have for that day, and we go down the list of ads assigning space to the highest bids and highest quality ads until we run out of room. (If it’s a first time advertiser, we assign a base score in order to get them started and to elicit feedback from users). In this way an advertiser that invests in quality content can pay less, and an advertiser that has a low quality ad is forced to bid higher. We think this system ultimately leads to better advertisements.

Some feedback so far:

So far, the feedback we’ve gotten from users has been mostly positive. We have heard from users that they would like to be able to comment on ads, which is on our product roadmap for this year. We have also heard that sometimes users bury ads but then still see them again later - this is often because advertisers test out many variations of the same ad. So, while we never show a user the same exact ad they buried we may show a very similar ad from the same advertiser. Another issue we have noticed is that some advertisers keep their ads live for several weeks, which over time can lead to very high Digg counts. As a user, it is difficult to know if an ad has 2000 Diggs because it’s great content, or because it has been there for a long time. We plan to create more transparency around the issue of long-lived ads as well as we continue to iterate.

How are the DiggAds doing?

In the first four months, DiggAds has been extraordinarily successful for Digg. From a revenue perspective, things have been great – we view this as a positive sign that giving users control over the advertising they see is a good user experience. Advertisers have given us great feedback, and we have seen some big brands make repeat purchases after seeing initial success. One advertiser told us they cancelled all their other campaigns except for DiggAds because it was the only ad platform that worked. Paramount studios credits DiggAds as a major contributor to the success of their campaign to get their movie, Paranormal Activity, released nationwide. One of my favorite brands Threadless has also been very successful - I purchased a Three Keyboard Cat Moon T-shirt through one of their ads so I know they got at least one customer!

Questions or Feedback:

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please contact us here.

Thanks for reading!
-Bob

Hi everyone -

Let's make some news!

In light of the recent controversy around the Toyota vehicle recall, Digg is hosting an exclusive Digg Dialogg LIVE event just days before the car maker testifies before Congress. We know there are a lot of open questions about how Toyota is dealing with this situation, and we're giving Toyota's top US executive, Jim Lentz, the opportunity to address them.

Digg is the only place you'll have the chance to pose questions directly to Toyota's top management, and get the answers you're looking for. So, submit and Digg questions from now until Monday, February 8th at 8AM PT. Then come back later that afternoon, at 2PM PT, to watch the live event.

This is your chance to shape the conversation and make the news on this important issue. We look forward to hearing what you have to say!

Thanks,

Mike

The Quality Assurance team at Digg is always looking for new ways to break things. We use a combination of unit and automated functional tests to make sure our code is working properly. As code is being developed, so are the unit tests which have 100% coverage. Of course, having machines do work for you is always better than doing it yourself, so we have a heavy focus on functional test automation. We use Selenium because it's open source and has support for lots of different browsers, Operating Systems, and programming languages.

We are an agile environment and practice test-driven development, continuous integration and deployment, and parallel development and testing. This means we are constantly interacting with development, design, and product to understand how features should behave and identify the best ways to test them.

We use really cool tools like Twist from Thoughtworks (to manage our automated suite), Sauce Labs (to run all of our tests on all of our supported browsers in parallel) and Hudson (to manage our continuous integration environment). We've hooked these all together so that when automated tests fail, an embedded video of the failure is already waiting for us in our reports. Look for more QA posts in the future about the specifics of our process.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, we are looking for amazing test engineers. To find out more about joining Digg's rock star QA team, go to digg.com/jobs; we're all business.