Exclusive Video And Screenshots Of Digg Version 4

I don't understand the reasoning behind this move. Sure, I get that it's 'cool'- Digg just has Twitter/Facebook/etc envy.<p>Digg used to be a place for finding crowd sourced news (or, more recently, lolcats). Now, it will be merely yet another way to share links with your friends. I get that enough on other sites (Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Buzz, etc). In order to get any value, you will need to be following a large number of diverse and interesting people who post cool and relevant links. Prior to the changes, you merely had to type in digg.com in order to see what the "world" found interesting.<p>Digg had a brilliant concept- make the users the editors. When it started, it was great- it had relevant and timely tech and political news. As it grew, they found themselves victims of catering to the lowest common denominator (which equates to funny pictures, it seems). Rather than use v4 to figure out a way to change this (maybe similar to Reddits' subreddits?), they created a Digg-styled Facebook clone.<p>Yes, Top News is still there. However, it's been relegated to a tab.<p>I wish Digg the best, however I don't see myself using it if I need to follow and share in order to derive value from the site. It's unfortunately- Digg has always been a quality site (in terms of software and vision, if not content).

It's rather telling that they're marketing Digg as a way to get traffic. Yes, it's good for that that, but that's not what it's <i>for</i>. It's (well, used to be) for finding interesting news, articles, links, etc. Getting more people to post their own blogspam probably won't help the site much. And for the actual users, I think it'd be a little disheartening to see Rose trying to appeal to publishers rather than the community.

Hmm, so the idea is basically a mashup of current Digg, plus some ideas from Twitter and Delicious<p>Not all that shoddy, though it strikes me that finding people to follow might be difficult if you don't have a Twitter or Facebook presence.

I'm going to toot my own horn, here. Almost three years ago to the day I wrote an article outlining what Digg should do in light of the launch of the Facebook Platform:<p>1. Digg should become the default way people like and share things on the web and, in particular, Facebook.<p>2. Digg should reflect shared content through the social graph, vs. showing me an aggregate view of all activity in the world. The former is social, the latter is not.<p>3. Digg should have a concerted Facebook strategy to accelerate their growth, focusing particularly on the Facebook feed (which was less than a year old at the time).<p>Three years later Digg is just getting around to this, but Facebook has already gotten to (1) and (2) with their "like" button and their new connect implementation.<p>Ho hum. To little too late? Sites like <a href="http://likebutton.me/" rel="nofollow">http://likebutton.me/</a> are in many ways more compelling than digg, which is still dominated by stories that appeal to a very narrow demographic.<p><a href="http://20bits.com/articles/5-ways-to-improve-the-digg-app/" rel="nofollow">http://20bits.com/articles/5-ways-to-improve-the-digg-app/</a><p>Also, FWIW, Eli White from Digg responded to my article noting the technical difficulty in implementing some of my suggestions -- difficulties which were shortly eliminated by changes to the Facebook platform. So I know at least someone at Digg read it.

If I'm understanding the video correctly, I'll have the same problem that I have with Facebook and Twitter: interesting things are either getting drowned out or not being posted at all. I agree with a few of the other posts; this feels like more of a half-hearted attempt to mimic existing sites, instead of delivering something completely new, the way Digg did in December 2004.

Regardless of what the haters are saying, this looks cool.<p>I was an early digg user, and have stopped using it recently because I migrated to other communities like HN.<p>But this could get me interested again.<p>This could potentially be very major.<p>It could almost replace twitter for me, because the #1 reason I use it is for link discovery and propagation. This looks like it is built to handle it that very function from the ground-up.<p>As a publisher, I am really excited about that.<p>Edit: As an aside, I am glad that Digg kinda lost it's way - otherwise I wouldn't have migrated to HN (which I am glad I did). But now it would be cool to have both.

I see the value in forcing users to self-curate since it allows you to disconnect from the chaff, and it's an interesting play to capture the value of interest-based link sharing in theory. However, like TC, I don't even need to say why it will fail.

I hope there's more, because this just looks like minor refinements. Hardly worth the 2 years and umpteen millions of dollars that went into it. "My News" isn't all that different from the existing user profile.

fuck, who cares?! hasn't twitter made digg completely irrelevant? (well, i guess all the idiots posting consistently useless bullshit helped too... yay mob voting!)<p>democracy works, unless half the country is texan.