Algorithm Experiments and Better Comments
update:The best sort has been temporarily turned off pending a bug fix
update 2:The best sort has been turned back on
Trucking right along, the Digg team has a couple of new site changes to discuss which are either going live today or have already been live for a couple of days.
- We are running an experiment with a Digg Top News algorithm change,
- we have made it easier to find the best comments on a story,
- downvoted comments have more visibility, and
- we have improved user suggestions.
Let's dive a little deeper into these changes.
Top News Algorithm Experiment
Our Top News algorithm has a number of levers which can be tweaked, and for several hours today we're going to be running with a new configuration. We are looking to see if we can increase both the quantity and diversity of stories on Top News without reducing overall quality. After running this test we will study the data and your feedback. We will probably conduct a few more tests based on the results.
We are making these changes to address your feedback and we want to keep the Digg community involved as we continue tweaking, so please do let us know your thoughts and feedback on this experiment in the comments or via our contact form.
Best Sort for Comments
Over the past couple of months we have noticed a major uptick in comments, which we are keen on seeing continue. Towards that end, we have added a new sort for comments: the "Best" sort.
Conceptually, this sort is a little bit similar to the existing Most Dugg sort, but rather than using the raw score it tries to figure out a confidence interval for each comment based on its number of votes up and down. If you're interested in more detail, we recommend reading this excellent blog post from Evan Miller.
We are excited to see how this new sort improves discussions going on across the site!
Down-Voted Comments
Another change we have made to comments is how we display comments that been voted down. Previously, we completely hid the content of comments with scores below your viewing threshold (you can change that threshold in your settings). This worked well for hiding low quality comments, but it also meant that controversial statements quickly became invisible.
We have always felt that a bit of controversy is where great discussions happen, and have seen a number of conversations which never got off the ground because one viewpoint's comment got voted to -1 and suddenly it had to be expanded to see if it was worthy of an upvote (it is just a little click, but hey, who likes extra clicking?).
To address that concern we no longer hide the entire comment when it is only slightly down-voted, rather we show a truncated version of the comment in a lighter color. Hopefully this will give rise to more great discussions!
Improved User Suggestions
We have also launched a number of improvements to user suggestions. In particular you can look forward to seeing fewer inactive users being suggested. We have a few more ideas we are looking to experiment with to improve this further but we would also love to hear from you how relevant your suggested users are!
As always, please let us know any comments or bugs you find! You should follow the fantastic people at Digg who are behind these changes: Scott, Can, and Jamie!
You can also give us a shout over on Twitter with your feedback and questions.