New Digg has tons of issues, Kevin Rose responds

They are going to have to get used to less traffic on their site. I don't get "used" to websites, I find new ones.


The new digg is awful.

Wait, so there are a ton of bugs and flat out broken features, but it's all because users hate change?

Wow, that's epic levels of stupid.

Users don't hate change, far from it -- often they like it. What they do hate are changes that remove functionality they liked (granted, sometimes necessary, but still), break tools they use, flat out don't work, and just plain make using a site harder to use and navigate than it was or needs to be.

If changes break half a site, don't blame the users for pointing that little factoid out.

The first paragraph of this article was awful. For the most part, it implied that the reason users hate the new Digg is because they hate change. This so far from incorrect it isn't even funny.

The new Digg is broken and has been broken since they first launched the beta/alpha. 1 out of 4 or so pages doesn't load and gives you a frustrating (albeit creative and amusing) error message. You can't, I repeat cannot, view every single comment for an article anymore. Nor can you check the reaction to your previous comments by clicking your profile.

The front page is now completely dominated by feed-fed crap from the big sites; at one point the default Digg front page had 12 out of 15 links pointing to Mashable. At the moment, 13 of the 15 point directly to their main competitor - Reddit, likely as retaliation for selling out to the big boys. Even the Power Users like MrBabyMan can no longer get to the front page because Engadget, TechCrunch, CNN, etc. all auto submit their stuff now and it is immediately seen on every user's homepage who follows them. You know it's a sad day when a message from MrBabyMan makes the front page (not even submitted by him, mind you) and Digg joins together and praises his comments. The man is (or at least was) the most hated user on the entire site.

On top of that, they did things like wipe out older articles and the diggs associated with that. It's being called a bug that will be fixed, but I doubt it. They are also calling the lowercase only usernames a bug but you were able to contact customer support the day it was launched and they would change it back and tell you it was a cosmetic change.

This is more than hating change. Digg did a complete 180 and are now serving the major media players rather than their users. A mass exodus of their established users has already begun and I'd bet good money that Digg sees a spike in registrations and then a sudden drop in activity while Reddit sees the same spike in a few weeks and a huge boom in activity.

(I apologize if that is a bit heated, I'm one of the pissed off users who remember the tech-only days of Digg)

The first paragraph is really dumb, I agree. I'm surprised Ben Clark (another writer on this site) didn't write it either. The level of stupidity and bias seen in it is something that can only come from him.

Or so I thought...

-sighs-

I was talking shit about digg on twitter and then out of the blue I got a phone call from Kevin Rose himself (http://goo.gl/2qAZ). That's some pretty good customer service.