Kevin Rose is killing the DiggBar | Hacker News Reader

Kevin Rose is killing the DiggBar

about.digg.com

154 pointsadamhowell35 comments

Completely agree. It is terribly annoying being linked to a website, looking up at the url, and seeing some bullshit aggregator or other url-forwarder. I feel like I'm being taken advantage of, and immediately bounce.

Why? I am not bothered by it in the least bit. It does not affect my user experience.

- you can't bookmark or link to any page you come across - the address bar will always contain the digg bar URL

- it's very insecure - phishing becomes much easier because the actual address is never shown

I'd love to see the same thing happen to Hootsuite's Ow.ly URL shortening service, which frames content in a similar way to the Diggbar.

I agree! Allow the bar to record the click through but quite the framing biz. I use the service but shy away from the shortner ever time due to this very point.

You can tell it not to. There is a setting to turn it off. I could give you details but I don't know how to turn Ow.ly's framebar back on!

I don't think you can do it for everyone who clicks your ow.ly link. You can only turn it off for yourself (like it sets a cookie or something).

I wonder if Kevin has done this because he is so in tune with what the geek-crowd think and if so has he made this decision for the right reasons? The geeks here in HN and elsewhere are always going to complain the loudest about things like the DiggBar. However, Digg is trying to go mainstream - do the normals really care about the DiggBar? Presuming they represent >99% of Digg's desired audience should they really make a change for the 1% that are moaning? Admittedly I have no idea what the point of the Digg bar is because I too hate it, but I wonder if amongst the normals it is achieving its business goal and therefore should stay?

Just playing devil's advocate.

I believe their desired audience is that 99% (now that the core tech crowd has left). Have you seen the programming section's 'popular' page? It's practically barren. That's how you know the original tech crowd left. In Digg's prime that section was poppin', so to speak.

That's kind of what the parent comment was pointing out. There aren't really tech geeks on Digg anymore, and the presumption is that only tech geeks care about not having the DiggBar. So maybe it doesn't make sense to get rid of it, if most of the people on Digg don't care anyway.

    Most recent: Chatroulette Is 89% Male, 47% American, And 13% Perverts
    Made popular 19 days ago

Just the way I remember Digg from years ago.

The average person does not care at all about framing people's stuff. Look at all the URL shortners on Twitter. There's a good number of "normal" people using Twitter and they don't seem to care.

Most of the URL shorteners on twitter don't do the framing.

Several do, though, and no one seems to mind.

Even if all Rose does is re-energize his core audience and get people talking about Digg again...that'd be pretty terrific.

The first thing I did after the DiggBar was released, was to turn it off.

I ended up changing sites - wrapping other people's content was creepy.

First thing I did was make a little js plugin for Wordpress, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/frame-breaker-removes-di... . Same code as one used to use to break out of peoples frame based on-site navigation.

Everything I look at through Digg is frustratingly slow to open. I'm presuming this is something to do with the DiggBar rather than the sites having trouble coping with the Digg traffic. I'll be glad to see its back.

Easily the most likable thing Kevin Rose has ever done. Not just the killing of the DiggBar, but the unbanning of banned sites, and this little bit:

Also with the launch of the new Digg will be unbanning all previously banned domains. While we will apply automated filters to prevent malware/virus/TOS violations, no other restrictions will be placed on content.

This actually gives me hope for Digg.

I agree that forcing content to be framed with the 'diggbar' is annoying/wrong/bad/etc, but I kind of like it as an optional feature. It can be very handy when you open a bunch of links from the main page at once, and then forget what the headline was or want to check out the comments quickly.

I've started using digg again occasionally and the Diggbar doesn't bother me that much from a casual user point of view.

What ended up making me turn it off was actually all the framebusters, because I had gotten in the flow of using it and when it went away, it was annoying.

Diggbar is dead, long live Diggbar: "That said, we will continue to iterate on our browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and IE. Look for seriously revamped versions of those in a few months.”

This is a nice first step to common sense changes to Digg. Features often seem like great ideas during brainstorming sessions, but don't rise to expectations when they are actually implemented.

Well, now we know which were the disagreements between Kevin and Jay.

Or Kevin took this opportunity to frame the DiggBar as Jay's bad idea, whether it was or not.

Good cop, Bad cop.

Digg is nothing short of pollution of the Internet.

Digg, back in its prime, use to be a thriving tech community. However, since its expansion, it has attracted all types of internet users who seek infographics, videos of cats and political commentary rather than tech articles.

i go to digg, click on some link, see a new page. so what is this diggbar? (hey, don't look at me strange, i use reddit..)

to answer my own question, it's described here - http://about.digg.com/diggbar - and seems to be something that's completely optional (you can enter a url like http://digg.com/http://google.com that displays, in this case, google in a frame with a "bar" at the top).

given all that i still don't understand a comment on this page about disabling it - it seems to be something you have to enable not disable...

It's not opt-in... At some point, every single outgoing article link you'd click on would come up in a frame with the Digg bar on top.

When it first launched it was opt-out. Due to everybody hating it, they changed it to opt-in.

ah! thanks...

How about the misleading advertisement 3rd down next?

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