How Digg Castrated My Friends

When Digg.com launched it’s improvements last week plenty of sheeple who don’t use Digg regularly applauded the move toward a more facebook like model. However other people who do use Digg called the update what it truly was, a mistake. Not to worry the Digg editorial staff squelched the negative feedback and continued on the path dictatorial control under the guise of democratic voting. One of the issues that didn’t get enough coverage in my opinion was the crippling of the “friends view”.

When you look at every other page on Digg the stories look like this screen shot below

You get the title, domain, and description all on one page. So you can evaluate a story based on those factors and decide if you want to read it CTRL+CLICK the link to open in a new tab. After you read the story a quick CTRL+W the window closes and you can “vote” for the story if you liked it, from that page.

Now lets take a look at the “improved” friend view

I get the title and which friend submitted it nothing else. No description no domain and most importantly I’ve lost the ability to vote directly. I’ve got to click the window to the story then click again to read it. In case you missed it Digg improved things by adding more clicks and page views.

Ok for those of you who haven’t read Don’t Make Me Think or have never used a website usability consultant, I’ll fill you in on a little secret, adding page views to core site functionality is not an improvement. In the early days of the net I ran a shopping cart designed by some over priced consultants who operated under the guidelines of no part of the checkout process should be below the fold, and we ended up with a 6 stage checkout. Later on I shortened it to 3 screens and we had a double digit increase in the number of completed transactions. When you’re designing a system you want as few obstacles as possible in way of what you want people to ultimately do.

Digg pretty much ignores user feedback about the issue so what’s a solution. I can tell you there is more than one private label work around at various stages of development/completion giving users back the functionality Digg took away. However what I’d really like to see is something like Digg Alerter become more robust and give us back this function and more. I’d like to see a normalizing/layering application built that takes the data from lots of social sources and aggregates it into one control module. I want to see how all my stories on Digg, Propeller, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Sk-rt, Newsvine, Hugg, Delicious and others are doing, at a glance instead of having to log into multiple services. I’d even be willing to pay a nominal monthly subscription price ($20-50) to use it. So c’mon there’s a free monetization idea out there, who’s going to grab the brass ring and run with it …

Popularity: 13% [?]

16 Responses to “How Digg Castrated My Friends”

1. Patrick Altoft Says:
   September 27th, 2007 at 4:32 am

   Somebody will create a greasemonkey script to bring the digg friends pge back to normal soon enough.

2. numlock Says:
   September 27th, 2007 at 5:20 am

   Theres a new site called PopTick about to go online that lets you track your stories across digg, reddit etc.. as an RSS feed.

   ISTR seeing another similar service already online, can’t for the life of me remember what it was called tho.

3. Anonymous Says:
   September 27th, 2007 at 5:24 am

   >>>No deception no domain and most importantly

   Deception…or description?

4. Michael Gray Says:
   September 27th, 2007 at 6:45 am

   whoops typo my bad fixed it thanks

5. Rhea Drysdale Says:
   September 27th, 2007 at 12:11 pm

   Excellent article! This was the one area that confused me most about the updates. They definitely spit in the face of usability for the sake of blocking blind diggs. I think it was a calculated decision though and they had no issues sacrificing a few top users to appeal to the masses. Bottom line though, it’s annoying for ALL users.

   I would love to see Digg Alerter get more robust, hopefully they’re already working on this. Your suggestion for an even bigger solution rocked, too. Again, I really hope someone picks up on it… it’s times like these I wish I knew how to program. =)

6. Tony Rocks Says:
   September 27th, 2007 at 2:51 pm

   I don’t think Digg needs to be more robust…if anything it should go back to the way it used to be: simple and straightforward. Talk about mucking up the place

7. lucia Says:
   September 27th, 2007 at 6:22 pm

   I’m guessing making it more difficult to vote is intended to prevent people from voting while never reading their friends story. That might increase the manpower required by those who hire people to digg.

   Of course, it increases the natural number of diggs too. Possibly the number of natural diggs will go down at a greater rate than the purchased diggs!

   No description of the story is just silly; requiring two clicks to get to the story is even sillier.

   The worst thing (from the point of view of gaming digg) if there are third party work arounds, the groups of digg for purchase will learn of these more quickly than other diggers. Then what?

8. WEBOSIS Says:
   September 27th, 2007 at 9:59 pm

   Since they updated, I’ve been using Digg less because of the usability issues you mention. It takes too long to do things that didn’t take as long before…

   I second the social media mishmash idea.

9. Mihaela Lica Says:
   September 28th, 2007 at 4:49 am

   Michael, why do you still use digg? As long as they ignore their users, particularly SEOs, I think we should simply stop using it and move to more serious sites. I know there’s loss of traffic in the process, but be honest: how many sales you made from digg?

10. Erika Says:
    September 28th, 2007 at 10:29 am

    Hi Michael-

    I think this was a great read. I am thinking, and this is just my opinion, that DIGG is starting to charge advertisers for page impressions on their ads, and this is why we can no longer DIGG off the friends page and have to click into the actual article.

    This factor hurts us, the DIGGERS (suers), but helps them (the Advertisers) get impressions on their ads, in turn allowing DIGG to profit.

    So- its really not that democratic after all, but more capitalistic- agreed?

    Erika

11. Joe Says:
    September 28th, 2007 at 11:15 am

    It probably had to do more with people mass voting articles and not reading them. Also the theory about increasing pageviews for ad revenue may have had something to do with it as well.

12. Jazz Says:
    September 29th, 2007 at 2:10 pm

    I think the niche social media tagger like Sphinn may be the wave of the future.

13. raj Says:
    September 29th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    Michael, I started hacking a “watcher” together in Yahoo Pipes, but back then they didn’t have the new “custom” module that I can hook into web code elsewhere. But the bigger problem is lack of good APIs for many voting sites. So far, I only have “watcher” Pipes for Digg and Sphinn, and even the latter was a chore.

    The output is in RSS, and my plan is to aggregate from several sites. If I come up with something worth releasing, I’ll do so.

14. Leonard Bartholomew Says:
    September 30th, 2007 at 8:20 am

    I like the change. Works more like Stumbleupon where you have to go to the blog post or article to vote.

    Reduces brainless voting and increases website traffic.

15. nXplorer Says:
    October 1st, 2007 at 3:06 pm

    I agree that the older version was better (more informative).

16. 4 Keepz » Blog Archive » How Digg Castrated My Friends Says:
    October 3rd, 2007 at 3:22 pm

    [...] Share This [...]