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.
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.
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.
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).