Digg’s Kevin Rose might be talking about traffic increases, new user signup numbers, and mixed reviews, but the rest of the world is seeing a new Digg version almost unanimously hated by the Digg audience. So much so that the first #diggrevolt since the infamous DVD code incident was launched the other day, which caused Kevin Rose to acknowledge some of the problems and even bring some features back from the old Digg v3, like the upcoming section, which would show stories that were on their way to becoming popular.
Another aspect that has really caused a lot of anger amongst Digg users, is the new power that publisher accounts appear to have. Even though Digg is not admitting it, they are allowing publisher accounts to take over the front page with a really low vote threshold. At one point 4 of the last 5 Digg front page promotions where from Mashable, but the funniest has to be the current front page, which is showing almost exclusively Reddit.com submissions (and a TweetMeme story).
Note these are not stories from Reddit’s blog or their users, but rather links to Reddit.com story submissions.
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/d6vod/beware_of_dog/
http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/d6wr8/what_the_fuck_an_influential_israeli_rabbi_has/
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d6tvv/worlds_largest_tidal_turbine_1mw_to_be_deployed/
Digg is attempting to make adjustments to the promotion algorithm, but many wonder if any loyal users will be around by the time they get it fixed. OR if maybe the problem is really just in new version as a whole.
EDIT: It appears that all the Reddit.com submissions hitting Digg’s front page is part 2 of the #diggrevolt and meant to show the flaws in Digg’s new publisher system.
EDIT 2: It appears that even with revolt, Digg still has the traffic to take a site down. Reddit has been down for some time now since getting almost every single front page slot on Digg.
There are no words.
You can't unjump a shark.
Reddit's handling the traffic just fine 🙂 Regardless, this Diggv4 fiasco will go down in history as one of the most spectacular web 2.0 implosions.
LOL at tdhurst!
The usability looks good, its just a shame the new digg is rubbish