The Cyborg Approach to Content Curation
For the past few years, the Digg team has brought you the stories the Internet is talking about. Starting today, you’re going to see us offering deeper coverage of select topics. We’re starting with the three that our users care about most: Technology, Entertainment, and Election 2016.
The Digg team makes a lot of the fact that we rely on people (or “human editors” as Apple might call them) to do the work of gathering excellent content. To do this, our engineers and data scientists built a suite of tools that allow us to filter through millions of articles, videos, and social data to curate the perfect front page. Smart editors armed with smart technology: it’s the cyborg approach to content curation.
When we engineered our new Technology, Entertainment, and Election topics, we developed a new system for gathering stories. We wanted a way to curate more content, faster. What we’re rolling out today is still “cyborg,” but it’s sort of reversed. Instead of our software enabling our editors, our editors are enabling our software by training algorithms to look at a massive flow of stories and signals to deliver a well-rounded snapshot of a topic. We’ve found that carefully introducing some automation enables our small, savvy edit team to cover more ground. We think this thoughtful combination of people and technology will deliver that Digg-quality mix of stories for a whole range of specific interests.
Check it out: Technology, Entertainment, and Election 2016. Look for the little ϟ icon. These stories are curated with this new approach.
