Digg was once the wildly popular social news aggregator on the web. It was successfully able to hook up a huge number of followers who catapulted the social network into fame and success. But then, Digg introduced a few major changes in 2010. These changes pretty much marked the decline of the network. Now here comes more changes to fight back.
A brief history and Digg’s decline:
Digg became popular because it presented a phenomenon – that even the news that are not mainstream can be popular and viral. This is precisely why the whole idea of Digg was so successful.
But when Digg launched Digg v4 in 2010, it brought a lot of changes to the website. Many of these changes curtailed a lot of freedom that users had on the website earlier. Naturally, this disgruntled the users. Key social features such as removal categories, friend submission, bury and videos were removed. Moreover, Digg introduced the option for anyone to auto-submit material through RSS feeds.
Users sensed that through these features, there freedom on the site was curtailed and there was an increased risk of spammers making use of the auto-submit option. So the users started leaving the website in huge numbers. The interesting part is that the users used the very same auto-submit option to push articles from Reddit onto Digg’s news stream. This also resulted in a lot of Digg users shifting over to Reddit.
Promises of a user-friendly Digg:
Now, however, Betaworks has purchased Digg(parts of) for $500,000. And the company has claimed that it will be revamping the entire website, putting the user at the center of it. The best part is that Betaworks is claiming to accomplish this within six days, with a team of 10 developers, designers and editors.
The new design, we are promised, will be modern, sleek and efficient. The reason why Betaworks is trying to hard to revamp Digg is summed in the following words,
“Digg represented the messiness of the Internet at its best. It showed us that, out of the noise and the clutter, between the lolcats and the Kim Kardashian stories, a passionate but uncoordinated group of strangers could come together to create something coherent and substantial. Alone, each of these individuals had no following, but together they were able to capture a global audience with stories that the mainstream media had mistakenly deemed unimportant. Digg is worth protecting. To do that, we need your help, your input and your support.”
The company promises that it will unveil the first version of the re-done Digg on Aug 1.
Source: Rethink Digg
Courtesy: Techspot
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