Morrie the Toupee Salesman

It seems there is a real thirst for data about digg.com and “social news” in general. Last week I read a post about the best time to submit a story to social news sites that seemed somewhat flawed. For starters it didn’t account for volume of submissions (or at least didn’t seem to). Furthermore it draws the conclusion that because Thursday is the best day to post, and between 10am and 2pm PST is the best time to post, therefore Thursday between 10am and 2pm is the best time of all to post. And I’ve taken far too many standardized tests to not see the logical fallacy in that.

Another stats guy has also popped up at statsbot.com, and apparently among other things, he has a large digg dataset from somewhere. Despite my role in the creation of digg I unfortunately don’t have such a thing. Oh, and he’s 17 years old and in India. Anyway… turns out the digg api is great for answering the question of what is the best time to post.

I collected some data on total submissions and promotions based on the date and time the item was submitted over the period April 4-May 4 (one of the calls in the digg api that is required is limited to 30 days).

The best time to post to digg? According to the data from the last 30 days its Saturday between 1 and 2 pm PST. Sorry to ruin your weekends ;-).

This also illustrates the logical fallacy I was talking about - the best day to post is Sunday, and the best time to post is 9-10pm PST, overall.

Here be graphs (click for larger version) They refer to POP a lot - that’s my acronym for Probability of Promotion - the likelihood of any story being promoted to the digg front page:

I’ll be posting the code to do this shortly, since it was a nice exercise in using python, r, rpy, and the digg api. And probably other stuff, starting with making those graphs prettier. That 17 year old in India gets me down :-(.

Also, because San Francisco is the known center of the universe, I’ve done all this using PST/PDT.

The usual disclaimer.