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by SupermanScott 5079 days ago
"Promoted Stories" myth needs to end. It wasn't the case, there was a severe bug whereby a Regular Expression only matched RSS content. The Regular Expression acted as a gateway into the Popular Algorithm. I worked at Digg and I fixed that bug.

It wasn't noticed before launch because we echoed the v3 popular stories into the beta version of v4.

Digg was never paid for stories hitting the frontpage. And for all the flack it gets for this myth, it should have been.
2 comments
laberge 5079 days ago
Well the fact rests, the community generally believed that there was a ton of promoted stories because, you guys never told anyone otherwise or did a poor job communicating.

And im certain promoted stories did exist, I remember them clearly marked as that.

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SupermanScott 5079 days ago
Digg ads existed that were placed in the feed at slot 3 and 14 which were introduced in v3: http://about.digg.com/blog/ads-you-can-digg%E2%80%A6or-bury

They were ads that were pieces of content. Digg was in front of this trend with promoted tweets / stories.

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nowarninglabel 5079 days ago
If you don't mind me asking, how good a job do you think John N. did? Did the buck stop with him on this engineering project?
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