Digg.com Faces a Cave-in
The social news website Digg.com launched its 4.0 version of the website a few days ago, but unfortunately it has faced a cave-in by launching a buggy, unfinished version.
The History
I joined Digg back in 2006 when the site was relatively fresh. I heard about the website from founder and former G4/TechTV host Kevin Rose while talking on the network’s “Attack of the Show” program. The website’s premise was great; The users find cool links and news stories online, and then posts them to the website where the users would then vote, or “digg” the stories up where they would reach the front page of the website where the majority of users visited.
I used Digg for 3 years before switching over to its competitor, Reddit. Digg had turned from a website where all users had a good chance of getting their cool stories/links on the front page, to a sort of “mob” where only an elite group of well connected “Diggers” controlled the front page of the website. This led to a lack of unique content reaching the masses. Digg’s promotion algorithm was seemingly unable to pick out spammers, as more corporate, mainstream websites continued to slam the front page of the site.
The Current Situation
Since leaving Digg for Reddit, I’ve only gone back a few times to see how the website was developing. It launched a BETA for version 4.0 a month or so back which I eagerly entered. I was surprised at how fresh the interface was. The new version of the website places a greater emphasis on what your friends are “digging”. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of friends who use Digg, so this feature is rather ineffectual to me. Users can customize their news feed by subscribing to content providers such as the gaming blog Joystiq.com; And this is where the controversy begins.
With customized news feeds, and stories from content providers automatically appearing in users feeds on Digg, they’re able to easily Digg what they think is cool. Unfortunately, the algorithm that once prevent spam from being filtered out is almost completely broken. It appears that once news stories reach a set number of Diggs, they automatically reach the front page of the website. The upcoming section, which once hosted newly submitted stories has been deleted, the website is plagued with errors, user’s “favorites” sections have been hidden, and the list goes on.
Kevin Rose and Co. have launched a new version of Digg which, once in the wild, has led to a sort of Armageddon on the site. Being a former TechTV junkie and fan of Kevin’s Diggnation podcast, I wish him luck. Hopefully he is able to dig his way out of this botched launch.
