Digg Redesigns, Loses More Than A Quarter of Audience

"Are the site's users patient enough to wait for improvements and bug fixes?"

It is not about bugs or improvements. Diggv4 is a completely different site, that does not have a lot in common with the old Digg.

I am not negative per se about the new design, to me, it looks a lot cleaner, but thats about it. It is not the looks that bother me, it is the fact that the site completely changed its purpose. I have used Digg as a silent reader (non power-user) for a few years. I may have left some comments here and there, dugg a few articles, but most of the time, I just went there to get "what the community decided was the best of the internet right now".

This feature is the one that IMO has been left out in the new version, the site has no interest in providing that service anymore, it seems.

The new version is filled with stories I have no interest in, the amount of diggs a top-story gets is marginal at best compared to diggv3.

The site has completely lost its energy, it has degraded to a pretty looking collection of automatically aggregated stories that a lot of people no longer care about.

The real question is, which quarter of the audience did they lose? If they lost the short attention span, ADHD, nextnextnext, downvote anything you don't agree with crowd. Then maybe they are doing the right thing for the long term health of the site.

And this kids is why you don't couple a complete front-end makeover with a back-end overhaul. It's never going to be perfect and bug-less from day one, and users will always equate something wrong on one end with hating the entire redesign. Comments not loading because of some consistency issue? They'll associate it with your new layout and start hating it.

The roll-out of features and changes should be gradual and isolated from one another. Theme something different there, move that widget to the other side, change your navigation scheme, comments are now NoSQL, ok start moving stories to NoSQL, and finally this is our new front-page system of you following users with a customized My News.

If any of those individual pieces caused an issue, or there was too much backlash, it wouldn't be associated with the excellent work and effort you've placed into all the other parts of the new site. You get targeted feedback, can quickly squash bugs, and your user-base is now accustomed to what would otherwise be a jarring change. Instead you get Digg v4, with weeks of broken axle pages, entire parts of the site not working, huge features and functions of the old site just completely missing, and what I can imagine is an entire development staff running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to figure out what part of their new system (or multiple parts) are the issue, and how to solve it.

Pains me to see them do so much right, yet still get so much terribly wrong.

Change is jarring.

Given the almost radical nature of the redesign it's not surprising that people didn't want to put up with it.

But if it is something for the better. Then a better design will see an influx of new users. It'd be interesting to see their new subscription rate.

I rather like the changes made to Digg. I got tired every day of going to the site and reading things that organizations obviously wanted to digg up for the sake of hitting a larger audience.

Essentially, it boiled down to kind of like trying to get to the top of Google Search rankings. And often times it kind of felt like if you go to Google and type "abortion", you end up finding the front page filled with religious, anti-abortion sites that paid their way to the top.

I prefer the new format since it lets me get news I'm interested in. Nobody can game the system to "reach me".

They re-added the "top news" section if you want something similar to the old Digg style, but the changes overall are for the better.

The only seemingly negative part of the change is the wealth of comments. Many articles now have very few comments. It's a fair trade off though since I was getting extremely tired of the dribble of interest groups trying to pay their way to shut me out of getting information I want to read.

It's a different Digg, and I think the execution and move could have gone better than dumping it on people without significantly announcing the change. They could have retained more users and gotten more support for it if they did just a tad bit of marketing first.

Either way, I like the change and will continue to use the site.