On August 25, popular social news website Digg unveiled a host of changes to the site’s design and features. More Facebook-like in appearance, the new layout is much cleaner and doesn’t contain the hints of A.D.D. the previous layout did. Digg has also curtailed the influence of so-called “power users” whose posts always seemed to make it to the front page.
These seem to be the only real positive changes, however, as many users are upset at the removal of many key features such as bury, friend submissions, favorites, upcoming and profile search. Many users of Digg protested and, for a short while, their posts were censored. Users complained that major publications had too much influence on the top stories and they demanded to have the playing field leveled.
CEO of Digg, Kevin Rose, responded to these concerns on his blog and expressed his intent to restore some old features and to fix the algorithm used to determine what stories make it to the front page, among other things. It could be too little, too late however, as many users are migrating to Digg’s competitors like Reddit who, even through their corporitization (yes, I made up a word) have retained their user-submitted integrity to where anyone (even this guy) can submit a story and have it hit the front page.
That’s the fun of these websites– I mean, sure, you get to read interesting articles and check out funny pictures, but when you find something online and you say to yourself, “Everyone should see this,” you have the ability to show the world something awesome. That seems to be the magic that Digg has unfortunately messed up in this revision.
It’s going to be a wait-and-see type of deal as to whether or not Digg can restore order. I’m hoping they can. I’m personally a fan of Kevin Rose and I try to watch Diggnation (their weekly podcast) whenever I can. I would hate to see a website that has so much going for it lose their user-base because some higher-ups decided it needed to be more mainstream.
Digg, you already had a good thing going. As the old saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
[...] This was a welcome change to a website that many users say has been flooded with idiots from Digg’s collapse. Unfortunately, the change was temporary, and soon we were back to reposts and [...]