Today, Digg is unveiling a new feature to help users find more stories under a specific category, starting with Technology, Entertainment, and Election 2016.
Until now, Digg’s front page was curated entirely by a team of human editors who select and queue the stories to be featured. With the three aforementioned topics, Digg is implementing a new algorithm that it says human editors “train” to help select stories relevant to the category. Editors do so by showing the algorithm relevant stories based factors like time and social engagements to help it learn to pick the right articles to surface overtime.
“We’ve found that carefully introducing some automation enables our small, savvy edit team to cover more ground,” Digg’s Design Director Justin Van Slembrouck wrote in a blog post. However, the team stresses that it does not aim to replace editors with AI.
“Digg at its core is always going to be human-curated,” Gary Liu, Digg’s newly appointed CEO, tells us. Although the new technology will be implemented to help pick stories under a category, Liu says the selections will always be a mix of AI and human-curated to maintain the highest quality content.
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The three topics will serve as Digg’s beta launch of the algorithm, and you can find them by looking for a lightning bolt symbol under each story’s navigation tab. Topics without the icon are still 100 percent human-curated.
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