Success

by Javantea
July 23, 2009

Success is defined by goals achieved and hypothesis confirmed. I have succeeded in many ways in my project Digg Diversity and yet it is not nearly ready for version 1.0. It remains Beta because there are issues that a person cannot overlook. On the other hand, I am able to use it everyday without any important issues stopping me. I suspect that anyone who likes Digg and doesn't like users that abuse Digg's front page can use this as an alternative front page.

One issue that I'd like to address in version 1.0 is to allow a larger set of data to be shown and compared. By multiplying the number of articles shows by 20 and filtering out all those items that will be given a score of zero (or less than 1.0) from the current version, the competition will become quite a lot fiercer for Digg Diversity's front page. Items that would never show up on Digg's front page will show up at the top of some or even all of Digg Diversity's users' list. The main success in Digg Diversity's 1.5 month Beta so far is that it has perfectly followed my hypothesis that is far graver than I even imagined when I wrote a rant against Digg at the initial release of Digg Diversity. In fact, the data that I currently possess is far graver than anyone could possibly know besides Digg or the Cabals that run Digg's front page could guess.

On my version of Digg Diversity's front page* the data is:

- 6.00 divvs
- 204 Diggs
- 21 Must-Have Web Apps for Designers
SocialWarrior, tonychenyj, ragebots, FirstCuts, Cararan, TouchingWood, acpl, mtnboy, gorgeoussand, HabsChick, Kronich, ThePowerDigger, thedudeofdigg, bhootnaath, MMusick, Jimmysh, sticks22, asm0, biofriendlyblog, anderzole, mattsaw, shadymarshall, 0ldB0y, Arkyll, hmjones, SpoonfedDesign, jodonato, spanky6256000
- 4.36 divvs
- 129 Diggs
- Helping hands will restore boy's touch
tonychenyj, beatnut2k4, badqat, FirstCuts, whiteblackninja, Cararan, acpl, mtnboy, HabsChick, Kronich, ThePowerDigger, thedudeofdigg, LtGenPanda, bhootnaath, MMusick, Jimmysh, MediaSight, Shiner76, amabaie, ff48, biofriendlyblog, lazycat, mattsaw, SweetVampire, shadymarshall, huggingthecoast, Arkyll, gbudavid, ubernoggin, spanky6256000
- 4.04 divvs
- 460 Diggs
- 5 Horrifying Apocalyptic Scenarios That Have Already Happen
beatnut2k4, biofriendlyblog, SweetVampire, hellengineer, concreteweights, WhiteCloud, ani625, spanky6256000
- 2.00 divvs
- 133 Diggs
- CO-OP 0205 Trine, Splosion Man (exclusive level), Critter Cr
zachery81, ImnotHerbert
- 1.69 divvs
- 74 Diggs
- Feds buried data proving that handheld tech is dangerous
ragebots, rwbrinso, yeeaauuh, socivitus, Jimmysh, ff48, NBCLocal, SweetVampire, kernowjourno
- 1.50 divvs
- 373 Diggs
- 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About
thelastcivilian, yathosho
- 1.48 divvs
- 290 Diggs
- WWII: American Home Front [PICS]
tonychenyj, rwbrinso, one504, mtnboy, mmaine, MMusick, blatant3, farazshaikh, asm0, doug41
- 1.14 divvs
- 254 Diggs
- IBM and The Internet of Things
tonychenyj, whiteblackninja, TouchingWood, farazshaikh, brathe, ubernoggin
- 0.66 divvs
- 132 Diggs
- Yury Verlinsky dies at 65; pioneered genetic testing method
tonychenyj, whiteblackninja, TouchingWood, apothekari, ubernoggin

* The page's contents depend on previous visits, so no one else's front page will look exactly like mine.

You can see on the very first one, 27 diggers scored 6.0 divvs. The reason for this is because each of the diggers had been seen before multiple times. In fact, the first two are nortorious (SocialWarrior seen by me 22 times (.045 divvs, practially worthless) and tonychenyj seen by me 15 times (5 on this page alone)).

A second example if that isn't enough: The last 3 articles are submitted by 3 different diggers, but the first person to digg them is tonychenyj (see above). The second on the last two is both whiteblackninja (20 diggs). The third for the last two is TouchingWood. Both of the last two contain ubernoggin as well. This is no coincidence.

You might wonder how I am finding the diggers. I am sorting by time, which shows that these people dugg these articles first, before it reached the front page. These people know about these articles before they hit the front page because their friends are the ones who are submitting the articles. They have a group of people who are choosing the front page content by voting together. This seems innocent enough, but their articles are the only thing that frequenters of Digg's front page ever see. They are corrupting this democratic news source with mob rule proving that democracy is tyrrany in this virtual setting. They are able to get away with this behavior with the encouragement of Digg's staff.

It is impossible for my experiment to turn over anything but more damning evidence against specific individuals and groups who conspire to corrupt Digg's front page by force. Alas looking at the evidence that has proven my theory, I can only aspire to advance my algorithm to further expose this fraud being perpetuated against the very readers of Digg. I hope that any users who read this or hear about this will stop viewing the Digg front page and will read Digg Diversity instead as it grows into a fair system to actually read news, not some random group's idea of what Digg should look like. I also challenge the owners of Digg to address these issues and reply to my accusations.

Today Digg Diversity was featured as Mashup of the Day at ProgrammableWeb** which gained 90 views of my website. I hope that some of those viewers will be interested enough to continue visiting this website. I will continue to strive toward making this website a valid alternative to Digg's front page. Wish me luck and tell a friend on Digg about this project.

** Full Disclosure: I am a contracter for ProgrammableWeb and influenced the Mashup of the Day process. Since the site is moderated by an admin, I waited over a month for my Mashup to be accepted which is the same as any other user. I beat out two Mashups for Mashup of the Day and I feel I earned it.

Also, you probably have no way of telling (besides the link at the bottom of the Digg Diversity page) that the information about who has digged the articles you have viewed is persistent across session if you are using Firefox. I wrote a very interesting piece of code that persists the data using window.globalStorage, an HTML ECMAScript (Javascript) object that allows you to store user information without using Cookies. This data does not get communicated to AltSci Concepts or to Digg, it is only for users to gain an essential feature (more data allows for more correct numbers). Instead of using a proxy and computing these on the server side, persisting the data with the browser allows users to carry this information without any server interference. I recommend looking at the javascript file that powers Digg Diversity if you are at all interested in this technology.