What Betaworks did by relaunching Digg without comments and without anonymity was a major screw-up.

I was a member of the Digg community for seven years. I was a heavy user. I spent hours on the site daily. I created over 13k comments. Not stupid comments (ok, a few stupid comments); many lengthy, well-researched comments, because I enjoyed engaging my peers in debate.

I don’t have any use for the new Digg.

I’m not trying to be down on Betaworks for attempting to fix Digg. I work in web development, myself, so I understand how long it takes to develop major features. I applaud their effort, and I like the fresh take on the design. But Digg without user accounts and commenting is not Digg.

I don’t understand what the rush was to get the relaunch out the door. It’s as if Ford was in such a rush to get a new Mustang out the door, but didn’t put a steering wheel on it. “It’s coming, be patient!”

Is there a reason that Betaworks needed to buyout Digg, rather than simply register a new domain? Presumably, it was to get the userbase (and lots of free PR). Well, the Digg userbase has almost a decade of expectations as to what Digg is. Betaworks has produced a site that does not yet come close to meeting those expectations. Betaworks therefore should not expect that the userbase that they paid for will stick around.

I would have preferred that Betaworks left the old Digg in place, and had taken their time to make the relaunch of Digg feature complete. We (the loyal users) stuck around after the mass exodus following v4, we could have hung in there a few more months while they got it right.