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How Digg Gets Everything Backwards.. And How to Fix It
mouser:
Another point worth mentioning is a comparison with StumbleUpon.
A serious problem with Digg is how hard it is to add a story, which exacerbates the situation where only a very tiny percentage of Digg users submit new stories.
One thing that StumbleUpon really gets right is the ease of "adding" a new story (url). Essentially you just click a button as you are browsing.
allen:
I think a key difference between dig and stumbleupon is the fact that with stumbleupon, there is no front page to try to get your links to. There's no point where there is a select, limited amount of space to try to ascend to. While there is a ranking system based on your "popularity", there is no quota to fill, one need only be an active member with a great deal of links floating around to reach full status on that.
Links you add and approve/disapprove impact you and others with taste similar to you -- and nothing else. Stumbleupon is a different service altogether. While dig is about taking a consensus and presenting what everyone must/will like based on that consensus, Stumbleupon takes the whims of the users and uses it to attempt to serve, based on the individuals preferences, what it feels they would like. One is a chef who believes no one will dislike his cooking and you will eat what is put before you. The other is a personal chef who, after a while, anticipates what you'll want next.
alex3f:
While dig is about taking a consensus and presenting what everyone must/will like based on that consensus, Stumbleupon takes the whims of the users and uses it to attempt to serve, based on the individuals preferences
-allen (September 09, 2006, 06:45 AM)
--- End quote ---
I agree with you. In fact, SU has the equivalent of digg's front page (check http://buzz.stumbleupon.com/) averaging the preferences of all users, but it is not the main point in SU unlike digg. SU buzz page is better implemented than digg's buzz/front page. For example you can't vote right from the SU buzz page, you will have to go and see the website first. DIgg makes it too easy for you to vote without even reading the story. Digg interface is thus conducive to information cascades, while SU design will break at least some of them. As a result SU has less dependent sample of user preferences to aggregate, than one which digg collects. Hence, SU can have a better aggregated estimate even with a smaler sample size. Of course, as you mentioned, the main strong point of SU is that it recognizes different clusters of users with shared preferences, instead of pulling all the users into a single cluster as digg does.
alex3f:
Since we are talking about diggs idea, I would like to post a link of its less known precursor: http://intermix.org Intermix stands for INTERnet Metropolitan Information eXchange. It is a free software authored by Roger Eaton around 1999 or even earlier. It implements collaborative evaluation and ranking of news, the same idea that later was picked up and explored by digg. Intermix has less users, but has some advantages over digg. I like that Intermix allows to rank stories by two criteria: interest and approval. To my knowledge none of the recent collaborative filtering systems has this. Sometimes I discover a website that is definitely interesting, but I don't agree with its POV. Since most sites interpret bookmark as an agreement (digg) or don't differentiate between the two (SU), I normally will not publicly bookmark such a site. Intermix is flexible enough to accomodate such cases.
housetier:
alex3f, thank you for explaining SU and digg. Now a lot of things are clearer to me, and I understand better what SU is about and get involved with them better.
The intermix thing also looks interesting. I'll check it out when it floats atop my todo list ;D
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