Posted on 04/24/2007 3:23:47 PM PDT by blam
Digg.com reveals news stories fade after 1 hour
16:18 24 April 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Belle Dumé
Online news articles can lose their appeal in as little as an hour. That is the message from two statistical physicists who analysed the way people access information on the user-driven news site Digg.com.
Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, US, studied Digg in an effort to understand the way online news readers consume stories.
Through a statistical analysis of the site, the researchers discovered that just a handful of stories hog most people's attention and most links seem to lose their appeal in just 69 minutes. Wu and Huberman say the finding could perhaps help website designers find new ways to keep people interested when faced with an avalanche of information.
The team say that Digg provides an ideal "natural laboratory" for observing the collective behaviour of online news readers. This is because the choice of links on Digg, and the prominence these are given, is determined by users.
Digging around
Each link is submitted by a single person and others then vote either for or against it, to determine its prominence on the site. If a story receives enough positive votes (or "diggs"), in a sufficiently short a period of time, it will appear on the front page of the site. Likewise, a story that receives too few "diggs" will be demoted to a less prominent page. This popularity information available for anyone to see.
First of all, the researchers analysed the number of diggs received by the 29,864 most popular stories posted to the site during 2006. They constructed a histogram to represent this data and found that it follows a "log-normal" curve.
This means that the majority of stories receive relatively few votes while just a few get the majority of clicks. The pair say this partly reflects the way Digg operates, since stories that are posted to the front page naturally receive more exposure and, in turn, more positive votes.
Wu and Huberman then tracked the numbers of "diggs" received by 1110 stories, minute-by-minute, in January 2006. They found that digging decays in a "stretched exponential" way and the popularity of a story fades after just 69 minutes. In other words, the rate at which an article attracts votes slows down – the number of diggs continues to grow but at a slower and slower rate.
Exponential slowdown
Again, this may be partly due to the way Digg gradually shuffles stories off the main page. But Huberman believes the result can also be interpreted as the collective "attention span" of Digg users. But he thinks the same may be true of those who read other online news sites. "The stretched exponential slowdown [or long tail] we observed is, in my view, universal and does not depend on the nature of the channel creating the news," he claims.
The finding could perhaps point to better ways of or varying content on a website, so as to maximise exposure to readers. "It might mean prioritising what goes where on a webpage," Huberman adds.
Clay Shirky, who researchers social software and peer-to-peer technologies at New York University, US, says the results are no great surprise. "It's how everything, from websites to movies to books gets hot," he told New Scientist.
He says this, and similar research, could help those designing websites that rely on social interactions between users. "For social site designers, the choice will be whether to try to heighten or dampen the effects," he says
Never heard of Digg.com.
Diggers are latte sipping, Linux using geeks who are rabid liberals for the most part. The are handmaidens to moron.org. Every second day there is a Digg story promising that Bush will “finally” get impeached.
How long does an average news story last on FR?
It’s the same here. But the researchers fail to take into account the torrent of new stories that push older ones off the front page.
That can be seen here at FR in a very simple way, in the number of duplicate posts. That doesn’t show that interest in a story has waned, just that the story has been pushed so low on the page that it’s not seen by repeat posters (who don’t use search first!)
Don't know. Some of mine disappear forever directly after posting, lol.
Albeit, I was reading one of my threads today that was seven years old.
If you stick to the technology forum, digg.com can be quite informative.
I find the Diggnation podcast amusing. A bit like Wayne’s World for the 21st Century.
Ah, so that’s why I’ve never heard of it.
My guess is that the people who frequent digg.com ain't so lucky.
It may be that stories do go by quickly on FR but they’re not soon forgotten. With any truly newsworthy related story, there’s more than one FRiend who will quote the original posting no matter how long ago it was.
man, these guys weren’t around here when it was Anna Nicole all the time...
people would hijack legitimate threads and turn them into Anna Nicole threads/rants...
Nevermind that her kid probably wont see a dime, as the attorneys will eat it all.
I hate those kind of hi-jack people...always interjecting Anna Nicole Smith, for no good reason.
- 30 -
I've seen some threads with 15 comments and 250 views.
Just how many times do I have to read the same story? Once I've read it, there's nothing to be gained in reading it again. The long right tail of the distribution is simply the people who didn't see it when it was first posted. As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer of them. A distribution with a peak at the left and a long right tail is almost inevitable.
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