Digg taking over Slashdot … says AideRSS
Very much impressed by the recent article on 3d rails on when to publish a post to be noticed we decided to give the AideRSS api a try. This rather new service (the api) lets you dive into the huge amount of posts of any major feed available. They also provide a home made ranking of all the posts via an algorithm named postrank.
According to AideRSS website:
PostRank™ is a scoring system that we have developed to rank each article on relevance and reaction. It is a core part of the AideRSS engine that works to ensure that this digital assistant is helping you to tame the RSS beast and keep your news stream manageable.
As it might be expected, the internals of postrank are not public and the algorithm must be studied as a black box.
Digg vs. Slashdot according to postrank
The endless Digg vs. Slashdot debate came up with some pretty nice studies and visualizations (1, 2 , 3 [a little bit off topic but it’s a must see article]) and thus we decided to our contribution comparing how Digg and Slashdot posts are ranked by aideRSS.
We fetched the last posts (since the beginning of year 2008) on Slashdot and Digg along with the postrank ranking and here is the result graph:
Clearly, according to postrank, Digg is taking over Slashdot in terms of post quality since approximatively the end of march 2008. As a side note, we could also add that postrank does not seem to capture any fall of quality on digg.
For a fair comparison, we also provide the same plot for two other news sites: reddit and mixx (click on the images for a full screen view)
Figure #2: postrank of Mixx posts
|
Figure #3: postrank of Reddit posts
|
No such bias is observed…
Slashdot participation
Surprised by the results, we decided to fetch the number of comments on a sample of the Slashdot articles. Indeed, postrank is supposed to measure “relevance and reaction” of the posts and arguably, the number of comments is another measure of the “reaction”. At least if the quality of the posts had dropped significantly some of the Slashdot users would have turned to another news service…
No drop in user participation can be seen from the number of comments on Slashdot.
It seems like the postrank might be biased in some way or maybe it has been changed over time in such a way that is favors Digg over Slashdot news?
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Right, but such a bias (toward digg’s posts) is kind of strange though.
We use R (http://cran.r-project.org/) for generating the graphs. Office can’t really compete with R when it comes to data analysis and representation.
Thanks for the pointer to R. Looking into it.
Also, the aideRSS bias might be because it takes Digg count as one of it’s parameters? Not easy to determine, ‘coz PostRank is a black box, but I think that will explain this.
I assume that since aideRSS is pretty new, they’re tweaking the algorithm…
BTW, how did you create the graphs? Office?