

Digg Redesign Tanks- Traffic Down 26% (Updated With New Reddit Stats).  - aresant
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digg_redesign_tanks_traffic_down_26.php

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jonpaul
You know what? Everyone is giving Kevin Rose shit for this redesign, but kudos
to him for having the balls to take the risk to not rest on his laurels and
try to improve. We'd all be lucky to be in his shoes to have that opportunity
to take such a risk.

The reality is, some business decisions are bad. But you really don't know
until you try them. i.e. you get nowhere without taking risk.

~~~
seltzered
but he took the risk, then immediately left the company. He tried but didn't
stay to take actions/accept the problems.

(Disclaimer: I'm assuming Rose left, and wasn't ousted out)

~~~
pavs
When he took over, right from the beginning he said this was temp till they
find a suitable replacement. About a week before the v4 went public, it was
announced that he would be stepping down as they found someone to replace him.
After the v4 was released he stepped down as he promised he will do all these
time.

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davidcann
My usage of Digg is actually up recently. The front page stories have rarely
been interesting since Digg went mainstream a few years ago.

Digg 4 is actually useful because it's like twitter without the chatter. The
only annoying thing now is that they keep logging me out every couple days.

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ojbyrne
I'd suggest that much of the decline in traffic was due to the demise of the
DiggBar, so it was fake traffic anyway.

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arn
So, RRW updated with actual stats from Reddit. which isn't a fair comparison.

If Hitwise's Reddit stats are wrong, then their Digg stats are probably wrong
too. So you can't compare Hitwise Digg stats with Reddit real stats.

~~~
danilocampos
Hitwise and Reddit both reported the same trend. It just happened that the
reality was about ten times better for Reddit than Hitwise reported.

Given that Digg didn't immediately chime in and say "hay u guyz, it was only a
2% drop," who knows? It may be Digg's reality is even worse than reported, and
Hitwise remains conservative.

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blhack
I wrote about this here <http://newslily.com/blogs/103> ...

To paraphrase, digg can still be saved.

1) The layout is freaking _horrible_. Yes, it's very CSSy, but you're not
getting very much content (at least not stuff you really care about) without
scrolling. Compare this to HN, or Reddit where it is just a list of stories.
This is much, _much_ meatier. Compare "Foreign Affairs" magazine with a free
college-town newspaper or something like that. The former is all content, the
latter is _some_ content, and a ton of adverts.

2) A lot of the stories that were making it on digg were blogspammy nonsense,
for the most part. It was lots of top 10 lists, 7 reasons why list, thinly
veiled excuses to feature half-naked women, etc.

The problem was that is there _is_ a market for people who want both 1 and 2,
but these people mostly don't want to have to _work_ to find this stuff. Digg
v4 means that they have to do more than they are willing to (this is all
subconscious) in order to get what they want.

 _This_ is the problem with digg v4. There were people who were _tolerating_
both cases because of the few good stories that did make it through, but digg
took these away and showed them nothing but top 10 lists until they find
people to follow. Bad move.

If Kevin (or whoever is steering the ship now) wants to save it, they need
_Kevin_ to get on the air and publicly say that he screwed up (even if it
wasn't him), is sorry, and that they're going to go back to what they had
before.

Honestly though, it might be too late. A lot of digg refugees have found
reddit, or HN, both of which are _hugely_ superior websites in terms of both
content and function.

Mostly, digg needs to admit they were wrong, take it back, and play some heavy
PR.

~~~
olegkikin
I completely agree with #2. Digg is being run by spammers and desperate guys
who will upvote pics of any decent looking women.

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nickknw
I dislike it when graphs are used to mislead like this. Take a look at the
first graph, its baseline is .008%, not 0% like the rest.

It is already a huge drop, you don't need to try to lie to dramatize it more!

------
mads
Something is a bit fishy over at Digg..

At this moment none of the stories in top news have more than 100 diggs -
except for one: The ad shown to me has 233 diggs..

Digg users sure must love those ads...

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danilocampos
Not at all surprising. My personal relationship with Digg was entirely
destroyed by the redesign.

It basically went like this:

"Huh. My RSS feeds don't work anymore... Oh. Digg's redesign is out. Hmm...
looks like I have to do a bunch of chores before Digg becomes useful to me
again." -click-

And I haven't been back.

You have to be on drugs to think you can pull the rug out from under your
users that way and actually keep them.

Evolving product is hard. Yes, sometimes you're going to have to cut features,
re-imagine functionality or reconfigure the user experience. This creates a
little grumpiness at first. If you stay true to the original mission of your
product, users will deal with it because it's in the furtherance of getting to
something great, and they care about that.

But: You've only got so much elasticity to work with in terms of your users
being good sports in these transitions. You can't make a name for yourself
selling turkey sandwiches and then "upgrade" to exclusively serving roast
pork. There may be a union between the turkey people and the pork guys but a
decent chunk are going to drop you and find the next-best turkey sandwich
cart.

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gamble
I wouldnt point this out if it wasn't so apropos, but...

This is basically the same story I submitted last night, but posted by a user
with higher karma and on the front page.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1722777>

Oh, the irony. =)

~~~
gommm
I think timing is more of a factor in this than karma... There are some times
of the day when new stories are less likely to be voted up.

The only time when karma does play a role is for stories submitted by people
that are in the top ten and are well known... But that's a minority

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MrJagil
I do not believe Digg succeeded in their redesign, but I am thankful to them
for trying. I greatly support Digg for being an ever-evolving platform.

------
teamonkey
I genuinely interpreted this headline as that the Digg community had
redesigned tanks to clear road traffic. The article was interesting but not
nearly as interesting as I was expecting.

