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Digg Users Swamp Revamped Site with Reddit Links
The new Digg site went live on August 25th
Last week everyone was discussing and trying out the newly-redesigned Digg site which went live on 25 August. With changes like a new focus on social interaction and incorporating friends from Facebook, Twitter, and Google and an upgraded link submission, Kevin Rose, Digg’s co-founder and the rest of the Digg crew waited in anticipation to see our reaction. Unfortunately for some, it was like throwing gasoline on a fire.
Until now, one of the primary problems with the Digg site were Digg’s ‘power users’; people who worked alone and in groups to game the news pages in order to promote or bury stories based upon their own personal agenda, which was often a political one. However, this new design is supposed to put an end to that; or so Digg hopes. Of course one should never underestimate the wrath of a power user; especially when you’ve taken away their bury button. On Monday, they spoke out by flooding the Top News page with links leading to Reddit, a rival social media site.
In his Twitter feed, Kevin Rose has acknowledged technical problems and the issues with the new design. He promises they will be recovering some of verson 3’s more popular tools, including the section highlighting uncoming stories. Users will also be able to recover deleted favourites through the ‘Saved Story’ section and the new ‘popularity contest’ element will be eliminated.
As of this writing, changes are still being made.
August 31st, 2010
Once again, this is not “power users,” it is regular users. The power users represented a handful of people, the sheer number of Diggs on the Reddit stories run into the thousands. That’s a small percentage of the people who browse Digg passively, but it represents a huge number of the active users.
It’s malicious to say that people are angry that their power to “game” the site is being taken away. Most of us never submitted top stories before, we’re just mad that now nobody except publishers has a chance in hell to do so. Make no mistake – we disliked power users too, but what Digg has done is take the power user problem and make it much, much worse – and now the site is suffering badly as a result. This “revolt” in putting Reddit all over the front page is just the users way of showing Digg how stupidly broken their new system is – any organisation with dedicated followers can dominate the front page of the site without breaking a sweat.