“Congrats! A story you submitted to Digg has become popular! It currently has 66 Diggs and 0 comments.”
You may have seen this message in your inbox if you selected to be notified when one of your submission becomes popular.
An option that has long been visible in your account preferences, it had never actually worked until just this last week.
So if you want to be notified of your submissions success, then make sure to turn the option on in your preferences.
On a more controversial note, Digg decided to change the way their DiggBar operates for users who are not signed into Digg.
After initially launching with all content being iframed, Digg decided to 301 redirect users who were not signed into Digg to the source page. However, without notification or announcement, Digg changed the way the DiggBar works so that it 301 redirects non-logged in visitors to the Digg article page instead.
A lot of people are upset by the change and even Kevin Rose himself indicated through one of his Tweets that he had no idea the change was made and they he would be looking into it asap.
Leo Laporte later had Kevin Rose on his show and asked him about the change. In the conversation Kevin confirmed that Digg was backing away from the idea of having the DiggBar urls work as a general url shortener and that they were meant to be shorteners for Digg urls specifically.
- (Laporte gives Rose the background from an article on Techcrunch)
- Laporte: Is that true?
- Rose: That’s a good question.
- Laporte: You don’t know?
- Rose: I’ve been gone for 2 weeks so I don’t know what got pushed, what code got pushed and how it functions but my last understanding is that what we wanted to do is have it so that if you click on a Digg URL it takes you to the Digg stories so you can Digg it. Rather than providing a short URL service that just forwards and does redirection we would just do a URL service just for Digg articles. Just like the same way that Techcrunch does “techcrunch slash 85374? – if you go to that you’re not going to go to some other site you’re going to go to techcrunch. That’s the story.
- Laporte: So you’re backing off on the original idea which is a general URL shortening service…
- Rose: Correct.– Did Digg Just “Bait & Switch” Twitter Users?
I have never used it as a shortener. To be honest I did not know it was ever used as a shortener. I’m always logged into digg so I always saw digg shortened urls go to the digg bar.
Kevin's trying to act like he's not responsible decision but they've effectively stolen millions of links.
This absolutely IS a bait and switch and Digg should be held responsible for behaving in such an irresponsible manner.