Why I don’t dig Digg

Columns about Digg are back, and the headlines are more creative than ever.

Poor Betaworks. For an investment group that focuses on social media start-ups, I can’t help feeling sorry for them; considering this is meant to be their area of expertise, the seemingly endless list of mistakes surrounding the new incarnation of Digg, dubbed Digg v1, is perplexing to say the least.

It’s not “dubbed” v1, it is v1. That means version 1, Mr Tufnell.

Forcing the user to sign up via their Facebook account is unwise. Along with many others out there who have a dislike for the organisation, I don’t have a Facebook account and I never will. (That might sound odd to some Kernel readers, but you’d be surprised how many people either never joined or have, in the last year, quit the network.) Insisting on an external authenticator excludes a large number of people who would otherwise be interested in engaging with the new design.

Additionally, those who wish to comment anonymously under aliases, of which there are many, will also take their custom elsewhere: anonymity is crucial for any website that desires large user participation.

As we all know, anonymity is also crucial for the “well thought-out and researched” comments Tufnell was somehow able to find on old Digg.

Further problems lurk within the design itself. On my MacBook, I can read 16 headlines on the front page of Reddit. On Digg I can read 5. This isn’t good enough. Why not ditch the Pinterest-influenced design and add an “upcoming” section at the bottom?

Kind of like this, which is at the bottom of Digg’s homepage?

Looks like the columns are going to be just as creative as the headlines. The crux of this whiny missive is that Betaworks launched too early, with too little, and that will be new Digg’s downfall. Despite this being exactly what Betaworks said they’d do. I have no idea what’s in store for Digg, or whether it will succeed or fail, and I can’t say that I care either, but I’m happy to see that version 1 of the tech columnists’ impressions is just as lightweight as version 1 of new Digg.