Comments on: Can Digg Apologize Its Way Back to Popularity?

By: Can Adding Staff Curators Help Digg Recover?: Tech News «

Can Adding Staff Curators Help Digg Recover?: Tech News « — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:07:45 +0000

[...] on more “mainstream” sources of content, and the new CEO spent his first few weeks apologizing and rolling back many of those changes, then laid off almost 40 percent of the staff as part of a wave of [...]

By: Digg Cuts Staff by 37%, Loses Senior Executive: Tech News «

Digg Cuts Staff by 37%, Loses Senior Executive: Tech News « — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:48:00 +0000

[...] and the company spent the subsequent weeks rolling back most of the changes that it had made and apologizing for the upheaval. Meanwhile, traffic at the site declined sharply — perhaps in part because critics started [...]

By: TW

TW — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 04:07:52 +0000

The thing is, sure a newbie couldn’t get something to the front page. It took me 6 weeks from signing up before that happened for me. After that about half of everything I submitted went popular.

If that is the extent of the grand conspiracy of digg power users, then they were practically an open book – hardly as sinister as folks like to think.

By: Carlos Chinchilla

Carlos Chinchilla — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 16:44:11 +0000

Agreed.
I was almost impossible to get to the front page without techcrunch, mashable, or lifehacker.

I always thought that they could do a little curation. You know, go through all the submissions to make sure something important/cool is not being lost. Reduce the power of the “power users”, which are the ones that used to control digg — now they are on reddit.

Also, they made tons of errors in the past… dont forget the digg url shortener… I stop using digg for a while because of that. Also, the HDDVD problem they had, and the bittorrent-Scientology-DOS story that got to the first page.

By: Buddha

Buddha — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 15:56:04 +0000

An here lies the conundrum with the technology. Everyone wants something new. The latest and greatest to match or beat their friends to the next cool thing. But in most cases there is a learning curve with the new technology. Once you learn it you don’t want to have to invest more time re-learning every time significant updates occur. Why is this the case? Because most technology consumers are lazy. Unfortunately, the more you drive towards the general consumer the lazier they are as well as the less technically competent so it takes them longer to learn. This is not a hit against the general public but rather a reality. The problem is that to stay relevant the technology needs to change in order to meet and/or beat their competition. We have seen many instances where great technology falls into disuse because it never evolved. So somehow you need to implement these changes in frequent but small steps so that the learning curve stays low. Digg didn’t do this. They waited too long and therefore the refresh and subsequent learning curve was too steep. Also, they did the unforgivable and took functionality away. In general, MS gets it right. If you want to see your Control Panel in the old format that you are familiar with then fine they will allow you to do so. Ultimately, Digg is going to have to decide if they want to change and obtain new customers or stay the same and slowly die with their existing fan base. It sounds like they are picking the latter but safer approach into oblivion.

By: Can Digg Apologize Its Way Back to Popularity? | Mathew Ingram | Voices | AllThingsD

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 07:05:58 +0000

[...] Read the rest of this post on the original site Tagged: Internet, Voices, digital, media, social networking, Digg, GigaOm, Kevin Rose, Mathew Ingram, Matt Williams, redesign | permalink var SurphaceSettings = { url: "http://voices.allthingsd.com/20101014/can-digg-apologize-its-way-back-to-popularity/", siteid: "atd" }; var _surphld = document.createElement("script"); _surphld.type = "text/javascript"; _surphld.src = "http://cdn11.surphace.com/rcwidget/loader.js"; (document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0] || document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]).appendChild(_surphld); « Previous Post ord=Math.random()*10000000000000000; document.write(''); [...]

By: research_paper

research_paper — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:49:33 +0000

Thank you for the brilliant analysis – I saw this news on another website but it didn’t evoke so many thoughts as your article. Indeed, Bing actually apologized for trying to make their service more open and first user-friendly, and it’s disputable whether a service needs to apologize for this. A perfect solution will, as always, be combination of the new and old interfaces and schemes, with the new features being introduced carefully and removed as soon as they prove to be useless.

By: Saad Kamal

Saad Kamal — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 07:27:00 +0000

I personally think that digg has been too dependent on the early ‘digg community’ way too much and has not done enough to grow that community of power users beyond just a bunch of geeks digging from their living room wearing boxers.

Front page stories was all submitted by a bunch of so called ‘power users’. Nobody new could actually come in and get something popular, unless it has a significant amount of media attention or the submitter has a strong internal network with other diggers.

So if you think about it, digg was never really a place to ‘discover’ stories, it was more like a general curation of stories in categories and come on even my RSS does that. A plugin like feedly or even the new Google reader (With social integration) works even better at that.

The only additional thing that digg had was the “comments” (200-300 comments) per story. But if you go and read any thread randomly you will find 99% of the comments to be bogus. Its like someone would just write “bleh” and that would get 200+ upvotes… so where is the value in that?

I feel sorry for kevin, he is a great guy and I think he should have sold this company a lot early. Now things might be a little too late.