Digg Redesign Tanks- Traffic Down 26% (Updated With New Reddit Stats). | Hacker News Reader

Digg Redesign Tanks- Traffic Down 26% (Updated With New Reddit Stats).

readwriteweb.com

34 pointsaresant16 comments

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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...

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.

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. =)

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

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com