Yesterday, Mashable founder Pete Cashmore wrote an article for CNN entitled “The new Digg: Don’t believe the snipe.” His primary point is that Digg should not pay attention to the multitudes of its users who are upset with the site’s changes.
The San Francisco, California-based startup might be on to a winner, except for a significant hurdle — a vocal segment of Digg’s users claim to hate the new site. Here’s why Digg had to do this:
Maybe what Cashmore should have said is, Here’s why I had to endorse this. He then could have displayed the screenshot below, taken this evening, which shows the Top News page, or what used to be known as the Digg Front Page.
The checkmarks are Mashable stories. Count ‘em up.
The would be 8. Yes, 8 out 16, otherwise known as 50%. Everyone is still trying to figure out exactly how much traffic a Digg front page hit will drive in the new version of Digg, but rest assured that Mashable is seeing a nice bump of 25-30K per story over a 12-24 hour period.
Another excerpt from Cashmore’s article:
Serving publishers appears to be a focus of the new Digg. News sites are now able to push their stories into Digg’s system automatically, and the service has selected some news outlets it chooses to recommend to users. (Disclosure: These include CNN and Mashable.) Given that publishers are able to generate significant traffic for Digg by using the site’s widgets and buttons, it’s in the company’s interests to cater to this group.
Yes, and it’s clearly in Cashmore’s best interest to tout the virtues of new Digg. Mashable did well on Digg before, but it is poised to dominate Digg now, along with other gargantuan sites of its ilk.
I wonder if Cashmore would feel differently if he was just starting Mashable out. He might be a little more interested in Digg being more of a meritocracy and less than a dictatorship, because that’s exactly what new Digg is.
By the way, and I’m not kidding about this, in the 15 minutes I’ve spent writing this post, two more Mashable stories have hit the Top News page.
Must be nice.
Now look, it won’t always be this way. In fact, Kevin Rose posted earlier today about known bugs (which this has to be) and said “Our directory of recommended users will eventually open to the entire world.” Well my God, I hope so. If I want to know what’s going on at Mashable, I’ll go to Mashable.com.
Basically, new Digg right now is closer to Google News than it is to what Digg used to be and what made it great. Surely that wasn’t the intention.
Anyway, I’m sure new Digg will improve moving forward, but right now it sucks. And Pete Cashmore can say whatever he wants about how great new Digg is, but just make sure you keep in mind that he and others like him have a huge stake in the new version being accepted positively. So accept their words accordingly…with a few big, fat grains of salt.
And Kevin Rose will need more than a desperate blog post to keep the anger of his most loyal users at bay. Hopefully he’s serious about the changes still to come. Otherwise, Digg will be losing me and many others. Maybe it doesn’t care now, but at some point it will.
* – Pete Cashmore photo credit: ceoworld.biz
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Jerod Morris is the Director of Blogging and Social Media for Orangecast, a web marketing firm located in Dallas that specializes managing the online profiles of small- and medium-sized businesses.
Jerod is the managing editor for Corporate Compliance Insights as well as Midwest Sports Fans, where he hosts a podcast, has been a guest on ESPN’s Outside the Lines, makes regular radio appearances, and has hexes named after him.
Follow Jerod on twitter (@jerodmsf), on Digg (jrod4040), or email him: jerod [at] orangecaster [dot] com.
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Just use reddit instead.
Its easy
http://reddit.com
The new digg is absolutely horrible. There is not one aspect of the new site that I like. And if I wanted to read Mashable, I’d go to Mashable.
I sure hope they can fix some of these mistakes. I really hate reddit.
@Dann
Just out of curiosity, why do you have Reddit?
Joined a few years ago to check it out and didn’t like it. Now I just use it to sometimes submit my own blog posts that no one reads.
I absolutely hate Facebook too, but actively use that because it’s the most widely used social media platform these days.
@Dann
If you really hate reddit, I’d recommend trying it again.
I was a Digg user since the first version. I was originally in the top10 page they used to have. I used it almost daily and refused to use reddit because I thought it was ugly.
Although since Digg announced this new beta, I had to try it. As soon as I did, I joined reddit and put up with the design. The day this ‘new digg’ was released. I quit.
Just give reddit a shot, there are many sub-reddit that will interest you and you can have them on the frontpage.
I used to get pissed when people would come to digg and say, “This was on reddit yesterday”.
Well, it’s true.
I was alternating between Digg and Reddit since I joined reddit, then I didn’t want to use Digg anymore since everything was old news from reddit.
Eh, just my 2 cents.
If websites were people:
http://i.imgur.com/7O71n.jpg