Why Digg 4.0 might make me a Digger again

I think the main problem with Digg is the community. There's too much focus on the people and not enough on the content. This creates a sort of "timeocratic" social platform where the people that can spend the most time on the site control the site. On hacker news and reddit, submissions can rise to the front page solely based on content rather than social position. This allows new users to submit content, creating a more diverse upcoming feed, and more interesting content in the long run.

Adding more social-oriented features will simply amplify the submission problem for new users.

I've been working on a site for the better part of the past year that I made to try to address a lot of the issues that caused me to leave Digg and to a lesser extent Reddit called http://chirplinks.com and Digg 4.0 is getting dangerously close to some of the ideas I had when I first started building it.

As the OP mentions, as the Digg community grew larger the frontpage stories became less and less relevant to me and frankly, pretty crappy, and I found myself pining for the days of old when Digg was largely a tech-geek community. The big reason I spend most of my time on HN is because the demographic is a lot more focused.

The light bulb moment for me came from my time playing with the Twitter API and getting more into Twitter in general. I had spent all this time cultivating my friends list on Twitter and I was getting a lot of great links from them, but not enough to where it would replace a good bookmarking site like HN or Reddit. It then occurred to me if there was a system that would intelligently start adding my friend's most trusted friends to my social graph based on the links I click on, save, hide, dislike, etc. I could build out my own social bookmarking community that was highly focused in on the things I am personally interested in.

So a friend of mine and I built it and actually just recently (quietly) took it out of closed beta to get some feedback. If anybody is interested in trying it out, feel free, although to get the full effect you need a Twitter account with a decent amount of friends. We plan on removing this restriction though so that anybody can jump in, pick a few topics of interest, and start growing their mini-Digg so to speak.

The problem I see with Digg is that they're trying to become yet another social network (YASN as I call it). I honestly can't see myself going through the process of finding friends all over again - I barely put in the effort to manage Twitter and Facebook. We built Chirplinks to work perfectly well without a full network effect. We figure why force users to build another circle of friends when they've already done that on other sites.

Anyways, I'd love to hear some fellow HNer's opinions on it, even if you don't want to try it out just feedback on the general concept would be awesome.

From the video, it looks like their target audience would be excited by a tagline reading:

Digg v4: now with more Facebook!

The styling, the focus of the UI, wow. I mean, sure, it'll probably work, but yikes.

Sounds like a google reader on steroids. I'd use it.

I think I'm going back to slashdot instead :)