Digg, Redesign | featured news

Betaworks bought Digg, the website, for about half a million. It’s a complicated sale. Linkedin acquired the patents, and Washington Post got the talent (the engineers).

The first thing Betaworks did was relaunch the site on August 1st. I noticed because their RSS feeds stopped working on Wopular. They had rebuilt and redesigned the site from scratch in just six weeks.

Design-wise, it’s now a three-column site - like Wopular (and Pinterest) - with headlines and thumbnails spread within each column. It doesn’t look as organized as before when headlines only occupy one column.

Senh: There's something wrong with these charts. Shouldn't the week of the relaunch of Digg v4 show at least a slight increase in traffic? During the launch date, the news media and bloggers were writing about it, which should result in a traffic spike.

The latest version of Digg - aka Digg v4 - is getting a lot of negative feedback from its users, especially the power users. They’ve lead a Digg Revolt by pushing articles from their rival, Reddit, to Digg’s homepage. Now, they’ve defaced the site’s comment system by littering it with anti-Digg comments.

Senh: This is pretty interesting. Digg's frontpage is still filled with Reddit links. It'll be interesting to see where this goes. Digg's redesign was aimed directly at lessening the powers of their hardcore users. Pissing off your most loyal users is never a good idea, but we'll see where this goes.

Senh: My first immediate impression is that it's actually better. The design is simpler and more streamlined. Although I'm not sure if it should default to the My News tab for logged-in users. You should always make what made you popular the most important and prominent feature. In this case, it's the Top News tab, which is the top news items based on Digg users. I'm looking forward to auto-submission of news items via RSS feeds.