Power Diggers React To New Version of Digg (video)
Yesterday the big news wasn't that Lindsay Lohan is out of rehab. The real news was that the new version of the social news site Digg launched to the public. Alex from Next Web has an overview of the new Digg.
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg's v4 launch caps a year-long teardown of the site's original mechanics: beta sign-ups opened back in April 2010, a July redesign made following friends and subscribing to sources the core experience, and Kevin Rose spent late August promising relevance changes and a CEO hire 'about a week away'. The v4 announcement went up the day before this rollout invited public feedback.
The stakes for the people on camera here are old ones. Digg's power users were the story in 2006, when CNET documented how easily the homepage was gamed by a coordinated top-contributor class, and the March 2010 reporting flagged that an overhaul would thin out the coveted traffic spikes publishers built referral strategies around. A follow-and-subscribe model replaces the open voting pool that made both possible.
First-order effects
- Power diggers lose their leverage overnight: v4's follow-based feeds mean a top contributor's submissions no longer reach a shared front page, so the audience they aggregated through the voting pool disperses to whoever users choose to follow.
- Publishers who relied on Digg referrals face the outcome the L.A. Times previewed in March 2010 — traffic spikes from homepage placement shrink as algorithmic curation and subscriptions replace the burst dynamic.
Second-order effects
- A displaced power-user class has somewhere else to go: rival social-news and aggregation services become the natural landing spot for curators whose distribution value Digg just deprecated, turning them into recruits competitors can court cheaply.
- Kevin Rose's promised leadership hire lands in a harder negotiating position — the CEO inherits a product already publicly rejected on video by its most active users, raising the cost of any further iteration toward the same model.
Third-order effects
- The episode marks the end of the democratic-voting aggregator as a traffic institution: if follow-graphs win, editorial power migrates from anonymous crowds and their brokers to named accounts and publishers publishing directly — the structure the rest of social media standardized.
- It also hardens a governance lesson for UGC platforms generally: changing the incentive structure of a community built around status accrual risks converting your most engaged users into your loudest critics, a pattern every subsequent platform redesign has had to price in.
The trend: Social news is migrating from open crowd-voted front pages to personalized follow-based feeds, stripping value from the power-curator middlemen the old model created.