
The New Digg Arrives Ahead Of Schedule - llambda
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/31/the-new-digg-arrives-ahead-of-schedule/
======
smacktoward
There's something about them calling it "Digg v1" that really annoys me. Digg
version 1 was... _the original Digg,_ no? I dunno what particular version of
Digg this thing is, except that as a reboot of an existing property/brand
_it's obviously not version 1._

It might be _their_ version 1, but calling it "v1" in public makes it feel
like the old Soviet pictures where the leaders who had fallen out of favor
were airbrushed out
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Sov...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union)).
"Nyet, Comrade! Commissar Rose was never in charge of this tractor plant!"

It just feels really disrespectful to the original Digg team, at least to me.

~~~
the1
original digg was v0. this is not lua

~~~
freehunter
And it then went on to several more version over the years, so even if it
started at 0 (which is ridiculous, this is version numbers not arrays) it
would still end up at more than v1.

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mindstab
So they lost the ability to comment and moved further away from the reddit/HN
tight text view (which they used to look like and have been steadily moving
away from) and now look like a messy news page.

Is anyone else finding this new redesign even more irrelevant than ever? What
does digg provide at all now? No discussion and a very messy hard way to even
find anything.

~~~
timdorr
What is "messy" about it specifically? I don't see much mess here. Good
typography and a visually-interesting layout.

~~~
skeletonjelly
The whole "mason" best fit I suppose. In comparison to say reddit and HN, no
real linear flow of headlines. Your eyes tend to dart all over the place with
this design looking for information. The F pattern seems to be proven as the
best layout for information absorption
<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html>

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mike626
I am not happy about needing to sign into Facebook and then having any story I
digg showing up on my Facebook timeline.

That's an overstep that will keep me off the site.

~~~
jjrs11
I think for a lot of people, being able to keep a pseudonymous identity is one
of the few things that differentiates sites like reddit and digg from Facebook
and twitter in the first place. Most people I know aren't crazy about letting
others know what their reddit username is, let alone slapping everything they
do on their Facebook feed.

~~~
vidarh
Exactly. My id here is my first name and initial. Correlating my username here
with my full name, which is unique worldwide, is easy.

My Reddit id on the other hand does not directly tie to my name, and that's
just how I like it.

It's still fairly easy to find - I don't care if people who really want to
figure it out, as I don't write anything I can't stand for. If I wanted true
anonymity I'd take a lot of extra precautions.

I just care that my Reddit comments don't show up on the first few pages of a
Google search for my name, as it lets me not think as much about my
"professional image".

Putting it on Facebook is something I'd never let happen.

There's a huge difference between being possible to find what I've written if
you really care about it vs. it being showed in the face of my family, for
example.

And this is without being part of any controversial sub-reddits. There are
plenty of sub-reddits or individual threads that are offensive enough or
controversial enough that I'd imagine they'd die pretty quickly if people were
forced connect their Reddit identities to anything that might be directly
matched to their names.

------
rwhitman
So they really did nuke the whole thing. There's no legacy content migration,
none of the user DB is intact. It seriously was just a premium domain buy.
Fascinating

~~~
Shank
It's all still in their backend - they're making a tool to pull old data out.
<http://digg.com/archive>

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jordanb
The cost of running the site seems like a red herring. Reddit is proof that
there's no technical reason why a community news site can't be run on a
fraction of the cost of Digg.

The real lead here is that Digg is ceding that market entirely to Reddit. The
new Digg looks more like a competitor to the Huffington Post. To be honest, I
think there might just be a business there. Huffpo serves a particular market
niche: predominately liberal female city dwellers and it strikes me that it
may be profitable to deliver the same product to a different niche.

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makecheck
The cleaner look isn't bad but _it is impossible to resize the text_ , even
when attempting manual zooming. This is certainly not the first site to be
conceited about text size but come on: this is a site for _reading_ things and
who knows better than the user what font size will be comfortable for doing
that? Also, I recall something in their blog about designing "for 2012" and
focusing on "the user", so where exactly does screwed-up layout fit in to
those goals?

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adamokane
I'm very interested to see what happens with this. I think they've made all
the right moves so far since the acquisition and I love the transparency.
They're going to try to stay true to their roots while also becoming "fast and
thin", in their words.

It also makes a ton of sense to have the algorithm factor in tweets, FB
shares, and diggs. Nice. I don't know if it'll ultimately work, but it looks
like a good start.

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SkyMarshal
_> According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of thousands per
month” to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site was
state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would be
considered legacy technology by a modern startup. Because of this, the new
Digg team decided to throw away virtually all of the old underpinning of the
site in favor of a fresh start. Borthwick wants to rebuild the company and to
do so, he says, it’s important to turn it back into startup mode and develop a
completely new and modern platform to develop the new Digg on._

Anyone know the tech stack they're using? Don't see anything specific on their
website (blog, about, careers).

~~~
kintamanimatt
Appears they're using Python/Tornado on Amazon EC2. No idea what DB they're
using.

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steveplace
This will test my theory that the success of a product launch is directly tied
to how many HN users hate it.

~~~
m0nastic
I'd actually been testing that theory for many months, and was all set to
declare it victory when Groupon happened.

I was sure that the level of negativity on the company leading up to the IPO
would pretty much assure it's success.

But I think folks have been proven to be mostly right about that (if not a
little hyperbolically fatalistic).

~~~
Steko
The "Groupon is a giant Ponzi scheme" conventional wisdom slingers of HN
haven't been proven right about anything.

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nostromo
Wow, Facebook required for sign up. Did they really throw away all of their
user accounts?

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protomyth
First, having to login with Facebook doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Second, am I missing the comments on stories somewhere or is it just a website
where links get voted on, but no discussion occurs?

~~~
ABS
1) this is the first release, after only 6 weeks 2) they are working on
comments

more on their blog <http://blog.digg.com/post/28441399381/welcome-to-digg-v1>

------
ChrisNorstrom
Oh no, not that "Magazine Layout" crap. I get why designers choose it, they
want to make the page look lively and balance content all over the place but
it's terrible for readability. It breaks natural eye flow from left to right
then top to bottom. With magazine style layouts, your eyes have to go all over
the place to skim through the content and that just gets annoying. If they
wanted to avoid looking like a blog but still keep the lively look and feel
they could have tried a grid like layout where at least the stories are
aligned horizontally in a straight line.

The style itself is really nice, blocky and beautifully simple. This is how
you redesign a content site, its elements are purposely made minimal, simple,
and sterile so that the content stands out above everything else. The site
disappears and the content takes the stage. Basically, it puts the spotlight
on the performer rather than the stage. Also, the site's so lightweight that
it just feels fast. Very few elements are begging for your eye's attention
which is great, it allows the eyes to go straight for the image and title.
Everything about the redesign is just so right, it's a shame they went for the
magazine style layout.

Either way, great redesign. It's won me over, and I will actually start
returning to digg to see how things go over the next few months. This was a
very nice rebirth, back to simple, back to content.

~~~
w1ntermute
The fundamental issue with the "magazine layout" is that it is completely
pointless in a digital world. The reason why magazines are laid out the way
they are is because there's a limit on space, so everything has to be crammed
in wherever it'll fit. When you've got a website though, there are no such
restrictions, so the focus should be on presenting content in the most orderly
manner.

~~~
keithnoizu
well to be fair there is some constraint in how much of a site afresh
impression is going to look at and the average screen size they will be using.
The grid is a less applicable but there's still some advantages to displaying
all of your important bits in a semi clean fashion on the landing page with
out flowing to far in any direction.

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zalew
> _According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of thousands per
> month” to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site
> was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would
> be considered legacy technology by a modern startup._

has anyone some details to expand on it?

~~~
Shank
I recall when Kevin Rose was interviewed prior to v4 launching, they were
running the entire thing on Cassandra.

When it launched, they spent the majority of the time attempting to scale it
in a quick fashion - a process which probably involved buying lots of
resources and attempting to scale as fast as possible. It was badly designed
from the start, and was never really fixed.

~~~
achompas
Wait, does this mean Cassandra == "outdated" by a "modern startup's"
standards? I know its a couple of years old (4, says Wikipedia), but...really?

~~~
SkyMarshal
That was Techcrunch's characterization of it, not a direct quote from
Borthwick or anyone at Betaworks.

~~~
achompas
Good point--I was just wondering if anyone had a comment on that thought.
Sounds ridiculous to me...

~~~
duaneb
Reddit, Netflix, and Facebook all use Cassandra. I think Techcrunch may have
A) misunderstood or B) been referring to archaic PHP code.

EDIT: Actually, it looks like TC has a history of believing Cassandra = Bad
for digg.com: [http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-
engineeri...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineering-
door/)

~~~
achompas
I was under the impression Facebook replaced Cassandra in their stack with
HBase.

Yes, I forgot about Netflix! Not only do they use it, but they've provided
tons of excellent tools for it (Astyanax, Priam) and blog about it very
frequently.

~~~
duaneb
Yes; Facebook has since abandoned Cassandra.

------
xSwag
I guess Digg is aimed more towards general crowd now that it only allows for
login with Facebook. In thier FAQ they mention it is to cut down on spam but
something tells me we will never see User registration. What about people like
me who do not have Facebook. I certainly do not want to make a Facebook
account to use this service. Furthermore, there are a _lot_ of people who do
not use it, why did they not consider this?

~~~
untog
_Furthermore, there are a _lot_ of people who do not use it, why did they not
consider this?_

"A lot" is a very relative term. Non-Facebook users are probably in a minority
in the kind of audience they're targeting. I think it's an interesting choice.
I'm not going to say it's sensible just yet, but when they introduce comments
it will be interesting to see if forcing real names brings the level of
discussion up.

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grandpoobah
This new Digg is utter crap. What a waste of the Digg name. I have no words to
express just how disappointed I am.

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petekp
This looks very promising. Seems like it'd be a great place to catch up on top
stories, sort of like Flipboard. Curious to see what they end up doing with
commenting.

The team behind this is clearly very skilled. Will be keeping an eye on this
as it evolves.

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ojbyrne
It seems to be a rebranding of News.me, rather than anything to do with digg.

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pacomerh
The right column is the one that is confusing, looks like its a place for top
news or something, however it's just another column with the same relevance,
this is a little weird, just content accumulated with no context. Also, why is
there no bury button on the home page, having only [digg] = [like] is boring.
Overall this looks like a wordpress theme for a magazine, very tired design. I
would expect more from a digg redesign.

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quotemstr
Goddammit, I hate it when sites intercept middle-clicks. Middle click means
"open in new tab", not "run some badly-written open-in-new-window javascript".

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Kilimanjaro
Oh god no, facebook login no. I bet my balls they will turn on facebook
comments in a couple of weeks too.

Sorry digg, me no coming back.

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jskopek
I'm all in favor of rapid releases and MVP, but this seems like a step in the
wrong direction. As many have pointed out, the site is missing many of the
core features required to build a community. This seems like a great way to
alienate the few remaining Digg loyalists

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austenallred
I like that you can submit by tweeting"[url] tip @digg", that seems pretty
slick.

Where do they get the pictures for each piece of content? Is it automatically
generated from the site, or do they go through manually for stuff that reaches
the front page?

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madprops
I think it looks very clean, very nice. I also think making it a place to find
interesting content to share in people's social networks, were the majority of
conversations are happening, instead of making people comment in-site, was a
smart move.

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dmix
Well, I don't think any of us were expecting much and it met that expectation
succinctly.

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jameszol
I'm having a hard time trying to find something that I like about the new Digg
v1. It feels "meh" to me so far. The layout of the content makes it hard for
me to digest...I already hope there is a redesign when v2 is launched.

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twodayslate
I have a facebook account but I have "deactivated" it (not deleted). I cannot
use the new digg. The facebook popup shows up and then immediately disappears.
This is frustrating.

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jmduke
I'll say this -- this looks much much better than reddit or HN on my iPhone.

But, as always, such sites' value comes more from their community than
anything else.

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JeanTouman
Does this mean it will also fail ahead of schedule?

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ehynds
Digging through the source reveals a konami easter egg. Unfortunately all it
really does is break the page though.

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fpp
Seems like old user accounts wont work any-more - instead requesting to log in
with a FB account - guys just forget it right away.

but then "De mortuis nil nisi bonum" (Speak no ill of the dead)

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lwat
Looks hot but it's pretty pointless without commenting

