Digg V4 preview

Digg was one of those companies that arrived a few years ago at the right time. Before “social media gurus”, twitter and all the other shit that populates the internet’s desperate modern attempt to become more and more irrelevant with each passing business-web seminar.

The point of Digg was to be a socially powered platform that lets user submit and vote on news stories. At the beginning, it was exclusively tech based but as the site grew, CEO Jay Adelson turned the company around and made it focus on news of all types. Tech, gaming, sport, politics and even celebrity. Their algorithm changes all the time to decide how stories make it to the “front page”, and with V3 the front page of Digg became far more honed for users. So things that appeared on my front page were catered to me. This was, in the main, good. It got the right content to the right people but also removed the “digg factor”. This was a phenomenon whereby sites would get to the front page of digg and then their servers would crash because so much traffic would arrive.

V3 brought terrible things, too. For one, digg is as slow as a pig on muscle relaxants. “Digging” (voting) stories up is a pain because all of these silly scripts run to make it happen and to have a fluid animation. Even a beefy PC or Mac struggles to render all the stuff going on. Even worse is the digg bar, which is a bar that appears at the top of every page, creating a frame below it for the content. So instead of going to a link out of digg, it tries to emulate the StumbleUpon bar to let you navigate around stories on digg. Like the founder and current CEO Kevin Rose said, this bar sucks. It has no interaction with the content below it, it slows things down and is utterly irrelevant.

Welcome, indeed

V4 aims to improve things a lot. A new socially orientated focus brings digg back to its roots. We used to have ‘shouts’, where friends on digg would send messages about stories they liked on the site. Now, in a twitter manner, you can follow users to check out what they like. The front page algorithm is then turned into something that involves seeing what your friends that you follow are up to.

The layout is far more “web 2.0″. Big, rounded fonts, nice big logo’s and tags that the most challenged of web user can understand.

Following friends is easy but doesn't work

There are still plenty of bugs to speak of but this is an alpha build of the site. It’s to be expected. With the new social focus it is odd that one of the bugs is following friends from facebook and twitter. It doesn’t work for some reason. So I’m stuck following the few people I was “friends” with on the original site.

#fail

Furthermore, adding stories to digg is much easier. Now, a lot like the facebook status updater, submitting content is a mere click away. It’ll auto-fill content for you so videos and images are fetched for you, rather then having to submit things as video itself. It’s all much more fluid and intuitive.

Recommended followers could be a good thing when it's properly in place

It also makes use of HTML5, so no more awful slowness caused by tonnes of jQuery, JavaScript and other mucky muck that causes browsers to slow down to a crawl. At least Apple will be delighted with it – no flash!

How it works

Overall this is an improvement. How it impacts stories is another thing. I don’t want to follow people per se, just get content the algorithm chooses for me. I take a very small pool of content from digg these days, so if they can improve how I get content then they’ll have me visiting more often. Regardless, they needed a change – bad.

The new digg