Digg v4: release, iterate, repeat.

August 27 2010, 3:23pm

At Digg it's our job to try new things, analyze the usage data, iterate, and evolve. While not everyone is happy w/the new design, as of right now the usage looks extremely good (ie. more people registering (43,000+ new users yesterday), digging, consuming, clicking, following, etc.). Our top priority is to stabilize the site, then we'll look at the data/feedback and make decisions on what to change going forward.

That said, I want to address some of the common concerns I've seen dug up.

The upcoming section is gone.Out of 200+ Million pageviews in July, only 0.4% was from upcoming (yes, that's less than 1/2 of a percent). I definitely see the fun behind wanting to see stories just before they jump, so we'll add a view of upcoming popular stories soon. Mainstream outlets and power users have been given more power over the front page.All diggs are still equal, nothing has changed there. Our directory of recommended users will eventually open to the entire world. We will sort users, not on popularity (followers), but based on how good you are at finding/digging content (similar to wefollow.com). This will remove the popularity contest and put the focus on quality diggers. The default homepage is now "My News" and cannot be changed.Makes sense, we'll add this setting. All your favorites have been deletedOur fault, we'll add these to your "saved stories" section. Comments from your friends preempt the main discussion.This was by design, we wanted to give you a quick way to see your friends comments. The comment box is three lines high, not resizable, and type out light blue text on white.We just changed the text to dark grey, we'll look into the resizing. Timestamps have been removed.This is a bug, hope to have this fixed soon. The bury button is gone.By removing the bury button we have put a stop to the bury brigades. The "hide" button next to every story also acts as a "report" button, if enough people hide a story a site moderator is notified and we review it for TOS violations. The report button is gone.It's located on every permalink page (comments page) under the story description. Historicalsubmissions, like the Obama victory thread, have had their digg counts reset and their comment sections mangled.We will fix this. The color scheme has changed.We refreshed the design. If something is unusable (hard to read etc.) please let us know. The thumb up and down icons have been replaced w/arrows.Look at v3, now back again, the arrows are now diamonds! Browsing a users comment history is hard.We'll add a comments filter in your profile. All usernames are now lower-case.We'll fix this. The RSS feeds no longer work.This is a bug, we'll fix this. All third-party tools are now broken.This is a bug, hope to have this fixed soon.

Some of these fixes/features will take longer than others, we hope to have the bulk of these issues resolved soon. Keep the feedback coming, thanks!