
Why Digg 4.0 might make me a Digger again - mschaecher
http://innovationhype.com/blog/why-digg-4-0-might-make-me-a-digger-again/
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someone_here
I think the main problem with Digg _is_ the community. There's too much focus
on the people and not enough on the content. This creates a sort of
"timeocratic" social platform where the people that can spend the most time on
the site control the site. On hacker news and reddit, submissions can rise to
the front page solely based on content rather than social position. This
allows new users to submit content, creating a more diverse upcoming feed, and
more interesting content in the long run.

Adding more social-oriented features will simply amplify the submission
problem for new users.

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runevault
I dunno, being able to pick who's diggs/submissions you follow in a personal
stream seems really damned useful to me. That way people I know create great
content I can follow their digg stream to see what they're doing without
necessarily needing to follow their twitter or the like. If people use it the
way it seems meant to be used could be awesome.

~~~
jokermatt999
Not sure if you knew this or not, but reddit has had this functionality for
ages. Add people to your friends list, and go to /r/friends. Alternately, you
can pick up someone's submissions rss feed, and I believe even their likes and
dislikes if they opt in to make them public.

~~~
runevault
But does reddit let you claim RSS feeds and auto post them as submissions?
Supposedly Digg 4 does this.

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jokermatt999
No, it doesn't. It's come up in /r/ideasfortheadmins before, but I don't
recall hearing any official word from the admins on it.

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marknutter
I've been working on a site for the better part of the past year that I made
to try to address a lot of the issues that caused me to leave Digg and to a
lesser extent Reddit called <http://chirplinks.com> and Digg 4.0 is getting
dangerously close to some of the ideas I had when I first started building it.

As the OP mentions, as the Digg community grew larger the frontpage stories
became less and less relevant to me and frankly, pretty crappy, and I found
myself pining for the days of old when Digg was largely a tech-geek community.
The big reason I spend most of my time on HN is because the demographic is a
lot more focused.

The light bulb moment for me came from my time playing with the Twitter API
and getting more into Twitter in general. I had spent all this time
cultivating my friends list on Twitter and I was getting a lot of great links
from them, but not enough to where it would replace a good bookmarking site
like HN or Reddit. It then occurred to me if there was a system that would
intelligently start adding my friend's most trusted friends to my social graph
based on the links I click on, save, hide, dislike, etc. I could build out my
own social bookmarking community that was highly focused in on the things I am
personally interested in.

So a friend of mine and I built it and actually just recently (quietly) took
it out of closed beta to get some feedback. If anybody is interested in trying
it out, feel free, although to get the full effect you need a Twitter account
with a decent amount of friends. We plan on removing this restriction though
so that anybody can jump in, pick a few topics of interest, and start growing
their mini-Digg so to speak.

The problem I see with Digg is that they're trying to become yet another
social network (YASN as I call it). I honestly can't see myself going through
the process of finding friends all over again - I barely put in the effort to
manage Twitter and Facebook. We built Chirplinks to work perfectly well
without a full network effect. We figure why force users to build another
circle of friends when they've already done that on other sites.

Anyways, I'd love to hear some fellow HNer's opinions on it, even if you don't
want to try it out just feedback on the general concept would be awesome.

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Groxx
From the video, it looks like their target audience would be excited by a
tagline reading:

 _Digg v4: now with more Facebook!_

The styling, the focus of the UI, _wow_. I mean, sure, it'll probably work,
but yikes.

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levesque
Sounds like a google reader on steroids. I'd use it.

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mschaecher
That is certainly my hope.

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wazoox
I think I'm going back to slashdot instead :)

