The New Digg Is More Social But Less Unique
For more than a year, Digg has been working on a major redesign of the popular link-sharing site, one that makes the social features of the site much more obvious, encouraging users to “follow” their friends and subscribe to preferred sources.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the arrival point of an arc that started well before today: Digg pushed deeper into social networking back in September 2007, CEO Jay Adelson previewed a vastly revised site at SXSW Interactive in March 2010, and by April the company was prepping v4 with beta sign-ups, killing the DiggBar iFrame toolbar, and promising to unban previously banned domains.
The redesign itself is no surprise — what matters is the shape of it. Following friends and subscribing to sources replaces the single crowd-voted homepage as the organizing principle, which cuts directly against publishers' interests: the L.A. Times reported in March that the overhaul was expected to lessen the coveted traffic spikes that made a Digg front page worth chasing.
First-order effects
- Publishers lose their most reliable referral mechanism: as the homepage fragments into personalized feeds of friends and subscriptions, the mass simultaneous visit that defined a 'Digg effect' becomes structurally harder to earn.
- Users gain a Twitter/Facebook-style graph — following people and sources rather than voting on a shared queue — while previously banned domains re-enter the pool of linkable content under v4.
Second-order effects
- Power concentrates among whichever submitters and outlets accumulate follower bases first, turning Digg's economics toward audience-building rather than one-off story luck — a shift rivals like Reddit do not have to match immediately but cannot ignore if advertisers price reach off engaged followers.
- Killing the DiggBar removes Digg's iFrame wrapper from outbound traffic, which restores direct attribution for publishers but also surrenders the toolbar as a retention surface Digg once controlled.
Third-order effects
- If the follow-graph model holds, social news converges on the same architecture as the big social platforms, and the criticism in GigaOM's headline — more social, less unique — becomes the industry-wide trade-off: distinctiveness sacrificed for familiarity, with curation-vs-crowd tension unresolved.
- A pattern where redesigns alienate core users while courting mainstream ones would pressure every community-driven site to decide whether its identity lives in the mechanic (voting, anonymity, front pages) or the audience — a question regulators rarely touch but acquirers and ad markets price directly.
The trend: Link aggregation is shifting from crowd-voted shared homepages toward personalized follow graphs modeled on Facebook and Twitter, trading platform uniqueness for mainstream social familiarity.