Those of you who have watched my recent video series on YouTube called Social Revelations will know that I spent quite some time talking about the advantages of the demographics for social networks like Digg and Reddit, and that I took some time to compare each of them to Twitter for advantages and disadvantages each had both in their ability to drive traffic, but also to impact the social sharing of key social messaging efforts by social media managers.
6 weeks ago Digg underwent a complete overhaul where the ownership decided to rebuild it from the ground up. The front-end now looks much more graphically appealing with a Most popular articles section that looks like a major magazine format, followed by trending and new content links as well, and that's where the good news seems to end.
From the middle of July to the end of August Digg has managed to lose 17.5% of its traffic (according to freewebsitereport.com) and their three month average page-views seem to be down by 60%. User backlash has been swift and significant, with complaints by users on the company blogs representing almost every single comment posted.
A recent effort to give users access to their Diggs from the old version of Digg.com was met with mixed comments based on the fact that the archival effort had many bugs in it, and also really underlined the general dissatisfaction with the direction of the new Digg.
The consistent complaints seem to focus on a couple of core issues with the new format. Firstly is the complaint that to log in now you muct use your Facebook account to connect to Digg. Those who have used Digg for years often did so because they did not want a Facebook account in the first place. In the old Digg they found the opportunity to promote news they found interesting and demote news they thought was spammy or boring.
Businesses particularly found the old format useful in measuring and building likes and shares for key messaging efforts. Readers liked the old format because it allowed them to directly dig up their own interesting stories and see whether or not everyone else liked them too. It was a totally different social structure to the Facebook format, so by making connecting to Digg through a Facebook login mandatory, many Digg readers and content providers are less than thrilled.
Worse yet are the functionality changes implemented so far, where moderators surf through thousands of submissions and select the links they feel would receive more interest from readers than others. Digg has incorporated Twitter and Facebook likes into their algorithm but has reduced the number of stories you can explore, resulting in huge community backlash and a massive drop in traffic generation. Out of 50,000 links submitted recently, only a very small proportion wound up on the site, dramatically reducing the number of links that received likes and shares than before, and massively reducing the quantity of content that Digg users could dig through to find gems about their highly individual interests.
Digg's management team has tried to make the site and the new iPhone app much more mobile friendly, but considering their former demographics, it isn't surprising to see that less than 20% of their traffic so far has come from mobile users, and most of their existing follower base is far more composed of the Android-friendly than iPhone owners. Will they get an Android app out in time to save their userbase? Will their mobility-focused plan save them in the long run? It's too early to tell, but it doesn't look good.
No one is disputing that the old Digg needed to change. It had fallen off dramatically in value from its hay-day, but was positioned extremely well to be a major contributor to the new search modality for such industry-wide changes like the impact of voice-search through Apple's Siri, or predictive searching through Google's Google Now, or as a key driver of likes and shares for search engine social networking contributions to their algorithms. It was completely democratic - what the people liked got promoted, what they didn't got demoted, and it was anyone's game to play
Today, with moderators picking winners and losers, Digg seems to be headed to relative obscurity unless major new changes are rolled out in the next few weeks. The prior role Digg played, though, was not profitable enough yet to really drive revenues and lift it out of the $10-15 million per year mark, and to become a competitor for Reddit, StumbleUpon and Twitter, it needed to step up its game and innovate something dramatic and new. Unfortunately, it looks more and more like this new redesign will have caused far more harm than good, barring some new forthcoming change that brings back the best parts of the Old Digg while embracing new technology to make it better.