Kevin Rose on The World of Digg | Big Think

Kevin Rose on The World of Digg

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The past, present and future of Digg.com.

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Kevin Rose:

Kevin Rose, 31, is the founder of Revision3, Pownce, and most notably the social-bookmarking website Digg.com. He is formerly the co-host working on TechTV’s popular show The Screen Savers and currently stars in Diggnation. Digg.com launched in 2004 and soon received $2.8 million in venture capital from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Why did you start Digg?

Kevin Rose: Well it started off back in-- kind of middle of 2004. There was a lot going on online. There was some pretty cool new websites that were merging and starting to take off. I was a big fan of Delicious, which was social bookmarking. I was also a fan of Friendster, which is obviously one of the big, first social networking sites, and also Slashdot, which was a really hard core tech news site that was all user submitted content. The difference being is that it was user submitted but it was still a handful of editors that would choose which stories made the front page. So it was kind of seeing all these things come together and the different ways that people were opening up and kind of different levels of transparency that were starting to happen as far as what I’m doing online and what I want to share with people that, you know, it all kind of was going around in my head and I said hey, we should apply this to news and just see what happens.

Question: Card: How does Digg work?

Kevin Rose: Sure. So essentially every single registered user on Digg acts as an editor to the site. So these people are going out finding news stories, finding videos, images, things that they find of value that they want to share with the masses. You come to the site, you submit a story, you give it your own title and description, assign it a category in what you think it falls under, and once you do that the story goes into like our upcoming area. And the upcoming area is not on the front page but it’s like the second page of content where all the stories live. And people dig through those stories, find their favorite ones, click the dig it button, add one to the overall count, the overall number of digs on a story, and once there’s enough kind of critical mass around a story that story’s promoted to the front page for everyone to see. So that happens all day long. We have about 130 or so stories per day that are promoted to the front page, and that’s how content is exposed to that large, you know, 26 million unique visitors per month audience.

Question: Stories are promoted based solely on popularity?

Kevin Rose: I-- the algorithm is very, very complex. It’s something that we’ve been evolving over time. I mean initially when we launched the site it was, you know, at the fixed number of digs, and then we added this really kind of wonky karma system that worked well for a while but then a lot of people tried to game it, and now there’s just a bunch of different factors that go in there that really look and determine-- they look at the digs around the story and say okay, does this story have a unique diverse pool of people digging it. And once we determine that and once we say okay, yes it does, then we can push it to the front page. But we had a hired a couple of, you know, math PhDs

Question: What’s the bury function?

Kevin Rose: Yeah, so the bury function is the same thing as a dig except it’s just the, you know, the opposite, in that if you don’t like a story or think that it shouldn’t belong on the front page you can just simply click bury it. And once again the same thing, we see that critical mass of users that is diverse then we will remove it. You know, if you went and created 300 accounts right now and all buried the same story, nothing’s going to happen. Like we have-- there’s a lot of kind of behind the scenes factors that we take into account to make sure that people aren’t using-- abusing the powers, both on the digging and the burying side.

Question: Can you customize your Digg homepage?

Kevin Rose: Yeah I think that Digg, the front page of Digg, has been this evolution of kind of different types of content depending on what’s going on. Obviously the election season has really pumped up the politics. But we had, you know, an all tech front page, then we launched videos and videos was dominating for a while, and then, you know, now politics is obviously a huge number of stories on the front page with everything that’s going on.

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