Kevin Rose Responds To Digg Users, First Wave Of Changes Incoming

On August 25th, Digg launched its fourth new iteration of the site, bringing with it a revamped interface, new submission processes and a huge focus on social.

Unfortunately for it’s founder Kevin Rose, core Digg users felt that the changes suffocated its users, removing the very essence of Digg; to find and promote new and interesting stories. The RSS submission service for media platforms quickly resulted in the Top News listings being dominated by major publishers.

Our very own Alex Wilhelm listed a number of changes Kevin Rose and his team could implement to appease its existing users and continue to attract new visitors, as well as publishers. It appears that the team at Digg have been listening and its leader has taken to his blog to respond to the huge amount of feedback that must have come his way over the past few days.

In his blog post entitled “Digg v4: release, iterate, repeat.” Kevin Rose conceded that not everyone was happy with the new Digg but did mention that site usage “looks extremely good”, to the point that Digg registered 43,000+ users a day previous. He also addressed some of the requests to bring back features that were dropped for the new layout and shift of focus on Power Diggers, writing:

• The upcoming section is gone.
  Out of 200+ Million pageviews in July, only 0.4% was from upcoming (yes, that’s less than 1/2 of a percent). I definitely see the fun behind wanting to see stories just before they jump, so we’ll add a view of upcoming popular stories soon.
• Mainstream outlets and power users have been given more power over the front page.
  All diggs are still equal, nothing has changed there. Our directory of recommended users will eventually open to the entire world. We will sort users, not on popularity (followers), but based on how good you are at finding/digging content (similar to wefollow.com). This will remove the popularity contest and put the focus on quality diggers.
• The default homepage is now “My News” and cannot be changed.
  Makes sense, we’ll add this setting.
• All your favorites have been deleted.
  Our fault, we’ll add these to your “saved stories” section.
• Comments from your friends preempt the main discussion.
  This was by design, we wanted to give you a quick way to see your friends comments.
• The comment box is three lines high, not resizable, and type out light blue text on white.
  We just changed the text to dark grey, we’ll look into the resizing.
• Timestamps have been removed.
  This is a bug, hope to have this fixed soon.
• The bury button is gone.
  By removing the bury button we have put a stop to the bury brigades. The “hide” button next to every story also acts as a “report” button, if enough people hide a story a site moderator is notified and we review it for TOS violations.
• The report button is gone.
  It’s located on every permalink page (comments page) under the story description.
• Historical submissions, like the Obama victory thread, have had their digg counts reset and their comment sections mangled.
  We will fix this.
• The color scheme has changed.
  We refreshed the design. If something is unusable (hard to read etc.) please let us know.
• The thumb up and down icons have been replaced w/arrows.
  Look at v3, now back again, the arrows are now diamonds!
• Browsing a users comment history is hard.
  We’ll add a comments filter in your profile.
• All usernames are now lower-case.
  We’ll fix this.
• The RSS feeds no longer work.
  This is a bug, we’ll fix this.
• All third-party tools are now broken.
  This is a bug, hope to have this fixed soon.

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Some changes for the better but probably not enough to turn the Power Diggers’ frowns upside down. It appears there are still a huge amount of bugs in the new Digg that the team are no doubt working hard on quashing.

It wasn’t mentioned in Rose’s post but the Digg buttons are also getting a makeover, getting a specific mention in the comments. The new buttons are expected to go live in the next week, reducing redundant references to Digg’s when they could:

There will undoubtedly be a number of revisions pushed in the coming weeks, when Digg V3 went live many users complained but hung around long enough for them to be ironed out. We hope that the Digg team can reach a level of equilibrium with its users and the associated feedback, so it can continue to push new and interesting stories to its ever increasing userbase.