Digg Launches Trends Experiment To Expose Better Content

Last week we posted a hazy screenshot of a new Digg voting feature called Digg Trends. It launches today.

The new feature shows an upcoming/trending story at the very top of the Digg home page. These are stories that are popular but haven’t yet made the top stories list. Users vote on whether or not they think the story should go to the top.

Digg says the goal is to put high activity stories in front of the community.

We’ve also heard that users’ predictive abilities will be tracked. Meaning if you vote a story up and it eventually hits the home page, you get additional authority of some kind.

Because there’s so much that happens beneath the surface of Digg, we’ve been working on new ways to expose the most interesting stories to more people. Today we’re launching a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends which will surface certain highly active stories as they’re trending to Digg’s homepage so people can vote on whether or not they feel the story actually belongs there.
How does it work? Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not. To make it easy to follow the action, we’ve setup a Twitter account to tweet out when a new Digg Trend is up for voting on the homepage. Here’s an example of what a Digg Trend might look like:

The goal of Digg Trends is to put high activity stories in front of the community quickly and to present a fun new way for people to express whether they like the story or not. We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible.

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