The New Digg Arrives Ahead Of Schedule
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Is anyone else finding this new redesign even more irrelevant than ever? What does digg provide at all now? No discussion and a very messy hard way to even find anything.
Would anyone consider this a ready to launch replacement? If they don't value commenting as one the of the most core features what hope do they really have?
To me HN is more valuable for the comments then the aggregation. I often skip the article and just look at the comments. Digg cannot now compete with this and if this is their priorities: big gaudy pictures, voting, and distant third or less, commenting... well.
good luck I guess but we have different priorities on what we were hoping for and expecting and need.
This is an alpha, or a beta, or whatever you want to call it.
Content-wise, it's not the same ol' garbage that keeps getting regurgitated on Reddit, or the same ol' subjects that keep getting rehashed to death on "Hacker"News. ("PHP is a terrible language!" "No it's not!" "Yes it is!" ... yuk.)
Visually, it's not a list of links which can only draw your attention by gaming the headlines. It's about time someone re-remembered that a picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words.
As far as comments go, it's been a long time since I've been consistently enriched by reading the comments on anything anywhere. (This thread is a good example, my blathering included.) I've got my fingers crossed for Web 3.5: "Here's a nice page, shut up and enjoy your stay."
My biggest complaint is the layout that seems to assume a huge screen or something wider than my laptop has. Scrolling left-right in addition to top-down is annoying enough for me to bounce.
I recognized most of the stories from Reddit.
Digg was a pretty awesome community in 2005 and 2006. The content was largely tech related and the comments were informative and interesting.
In 2007 it started getting worse, there were more jokes and memes and the content started to suffer. With no subreddit like system the original community began to become drowned out.
Towards the end of 2008 there was nothing left except memes and lame one line jokes that put youtube comments to shame. I was always surprised by all the people complaining about Digg v4 - the community sucked a long time before that.
I'm impressed by this revision, should be interesting to see what happens.
It's no secret that the community needs a reboot, and content-first development might work for a site that through any other implementation might just strike people as a poor version of Reddit (regardless of whether or not that may be true).
That's an overstep that will keep me off the site.
My Reddit id on the other hand does not directly tie to my name, and that's just how I like it.
It's still fairly easy to find - I don't care if people who really want to figure it out, as I don't write anything I can't stand for. If I wanted true anonymity I'd take a lot of extra precautions.
I just care that my Reddit comments don't show up on the first few pages of a Google search for my name, as it lets me not think as much about my "professional image".
Putting it on Facebook is something I'd never let happen.
There's a huge difference between being possible to find what I've written if you really care about it vs. it being showed in the face of my family, for example.
And this is without being part of any controversial sub-reddits. There are plenty of sub-reddits or individual threads that are offensive enough or controversial enough that I'd imagine they'd die pretty quickly if people were forced connect their Reddit identities to anything that might be directly matched to their names.
My lawd man, build your own. You restricted yourself to 6 weeks, not users.
>Using Facebook for account registration is a short-term solution that will seriously cut down on spam, while we take our time to develop more robust spam-filter technology. We know this isn’t ideal, so rest assured: we are working towards a more lasting solution. [2]
1. http://blog.digg.com/post/28441399381/welcome-to-digg-v1#com...
The real lead here is that Digg is ceding that market entirely to Reddit. The new Digg looks more like a competitor to the Huffington Post. To be honest, I think there might just be a business there. Huffpo serves a particular market niche: predominately liberal female city dwellers and it strikes me that it may be profitable to deliver the same product to a different niche.
It also makes a ton of sense to have the algorithm factor in tweets, FB shares, and diggs. Nice. I don't know if it'll ultimately work, but it looks like a good start.
Anyone know the tech stack they're using? Don't see anything specific on their website (blog, about, careers).
I was sure that the level of negativity on the company leading up to the IPO would pretty much assure it's success.
But I think folks have been proven to be mostly right about that (if not a little hyperbolically fatalistic).
The style itself is really nice, blocky and beautifully simple. This is how you redesign a content site, its elements are purposely made minimal, simple, and sterile so that the content stands out above everything else. The site disappears and the content takes the stage. Basically, it puts the spotlight on the performer rather than the stage. Also, the site's so lightweight that it just feels fast. Very few elements are begging for your eye's attention which is great, it allows the eyes to go straight for the image and title. Everything about the redesign is just so right, it's a shame they went for the magazine style layout.
Either way, great redesign. It's won me over, and I will actually start returning to digg to see how things go over the next few months. This was a very nice rebirth, back to simple, back to content.
Zite does this extremely well. Pulp, on the other hand, does it pretty poorly. Doing this on Digg's homepage is going to be challenging to not look schizophrenic. But on Digg's sub-topics, this type of layout will work well. I find scanning through tabular data to be fatiguing and I often scan over items out of boredom.
It's leisure information, not work.
This layout for digg fits in with casual consumption and discovery, rather than a structure that encourages seeking out specific articles.
I do agree with you that this is a beautifully simple site and will also revisit on a regular basis to see how it progresses.
Second, am I missing the comments on stories somewhere or is it just a website where links get voted on, but no discussion occurs?
more on their blog http://blog.digg.com/post/28441399381/welcome-to-digg-v1
2) Discussion on digg was always a bit janky. HN really spoils the idea of social links/comments because they are so high quality here, but when you're targeting the average person, its harder to control quality. Let people sound of on Twitter/FB, and you've created a new marketing vector without directly polluting the experience on your site.
has anyone some details to expand on it?
When it launched, they spent the majority of the time attempting to scale it in a quick fashion - a process which probably involved buying lots of resources and attempting to scale as fast as possible. It was badly designed from the start, and was never really fixed.
EDIT: Actually, it looks like TC has a history of believing Cassandra = Bad for digg.com: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineeri...
Yes, I forgot about Netflix! Not only do they use it, but they've provided tons of excellent tools for it (Astyanax, Priam) and blog about it very frequently.
Hence their previous statements. Kevin's statement was in reference to them switching completely to NoSQL and not knowing how to scale it properly.
"A lot" is a very relative term. Non-Facebook users are probably in a minority in the kind of audience they're targeting. I think it's an interesting choice. I'm not going to say it's sensible just yet, but when they introduce comments it will be interesting to see if forcing real names brings the level of discussion up.
"Using Facebook for account registration is a short-term solution that will seriously cut down on spam, while we take our time to develop more robust spam-filter technology. We know this isn’t ideal, so rest assured: we are working towards a more lasting solution."
The team behind this is clearly very skilled. Will be keeping an eye on this as it evolves.
It might be their version 1, but calling it "v1" in public makes it feel like the old Soviet pictures where the leaders who had fallen out of favor were airbrushed out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Sov...). "Nyet, Comrade! Commissar Rose was never in charge of this tractor plant!"
It just feels really disrespectful to the original Digg team, at least to me.
Sorry digg, me no coming back.
Where do they get the pictures for each piece of content? Is it automatically generated from the site, or do they go through manually for stuff that reaches the front page?
But, as always, such sites' value comes more from their community than anything else.
but then "De mortuis nil nisi bonum" (Speak no ill of the dead)