digg

Apparently dissatisfied with a redesign that buries much of their influence, hard-core users of social-news site Digg have been gaming its "Top News" page so that it's dominated by links to rival site Reddit.

The "Digg Version 4" relaunch, following an alpha test, was rolled out to the general public last week.

In order to maintain relevance in a world where users' individual "social graphs" on Twitter and Facebook bear a significant weight on news consumption, the new Digg promises a custom experience for individual users rather than the "old" Digg … Read more

Responding to user feedback following social news site Digg.com's large-scale redesign earlier this week, founder and interim CEO Kevin Rose posted on his personal blog that numerous changes and high-level bug fixes are on the way.

During the move, a number of changes dramatically altered the way users now find stories, as well as where promoted stories end up being seen. And from the looks of things, it appears that many of these tweaks created bugs, or caused longtime users to scratch their heads. "Our top priority is to stabilize the site," Rose said. "Then … Read more

Matt Van Horn, business development director at social-news site Digg, is departing for Path--the ultra-stealthy start-up co-founded by former Facebook executive Dave Morin and Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning. Van Horn's departure comes right after Digg rolled out its much-hyped "Version 4" revamp to the general public.

Van Horn was a hardcore Digg loyalist, something that comes across in a note he sent to colleagues Thursday announcing the job change.

"When I graduated college in 2006, it was a crazy dream to move to the Bay Area and join a tech start-up. So I took it … Read more

Molly Wood is back in New York for a new Web show on CBS called Eye on Parenting, so of course we invite her on the show to chat with us about Gmail voice calling, the new Digg layout, and an ironic Twitter post from Gizmodo's Brian Lam that segues into a live in-person Molly rant!

Google just announced that it's adding the ability to place real live phone calls and send text messages straight from your Gmail window. Internet calling isn't new by any means, but where you formerly had to arrange a specific time to … Read more

It's still too early to tell whether the redesigned and revamped Digg, which went live on Wednesday following a limited private alpha test, will be enough to resuscitate the once-hot social news site. The usual suspects of the blogger punditocracy seem to agree: it's all dependent on how the community reacts, and Diggers are unpredictable.

The "new Digg," which puts a focus on a customized news lineup based on content chosen from social-network friends as well as celebrities and brands that the user opts to follow, is a big change from its predecessor, in which Digg … Read more

Are conservatives gaming Digg? Probably, but there are two sides to any story.

A report by liberal news organization AlterNet claimed on Thursday that conservatives are "burying" stories on the news aggregator. "A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives."

Conservatives--in this case, "Digg Patriots"--"cheat" by voting down Digg submissions with a liberal bent, AlterNet claims. "This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction."

I'm not going to argue with the basics of the report because this sort of thing goes on with both conservative and liberal groups. (AlterNet could have easily expanded the scope of "certain groups" to include liberals but chose not to.) I am going to take issue, however, with its tenor and balance, as it was implied by some blogs that the AlterNet findings were coming from a neutral source.

Specifically, when AlterNet inserts a paragraph listing all of the things Digg Patriots allegedly hate, then claims generally in the last sentence that Digg Patriots "just love to hate," Alternet forfeits any claim to balance--and possibly veracity.

I visit Digg's front door often, and what I usually find is hardly proof that conservative groups are succeeding in any way. Here's a very unscientific sampling of what I've found as some of the most-dugg (top 10) submissions as I randomly visited the Digg front door during the last few days. "Fox News is shockingly old" and "Conservapedia:E=mc2 Is A Liberal Conspiracy and "Liberals Start F*** Tea Party Campaign." (I've omitted the last ink because the original headline uses three letters of a four-letter expletive.)

A September 2008 report from PBS titled "Digg Puts Focus on Politics, Bringing Charges of Liberal Bias" says:… Read more

The big fight between the Pentagon and Wikileaks has gotten to the high school breakup stage: the Pentagon wants Wikileaks to put its mix tapes, photos, and t-shirts in a shoebox and mail them back. Also, another rousing argument on Net neutrality, this time with Brian Cooley's uniquely capitalist viewpoint in the mix. Good times.

A report posted Thursday by online progressive news magazine AlterNet has detailed a year-long "undercover operation" at infiltrating a group of conservative Digg.com super users called the "Digg Patriots," who use their collective voting power to control what stories get onto Digg's front page.

AlterNet's report details tactics used by the 100-some members of the user group, who allegedly communicate through a Yahoo Groups site, and have done so since early 2009.

Its members cull both Digg's front page and its upcoming section to find what they consider liberal or otherwise anticonservative … Read more

Social news sites Digg and Reddit arguably have the same core objective: providing a never-ending stream of interesting links from around the Web. But there's long been grumbling among users on both sites about which site has a larger influence, and where each one gets its source material.

To answer these questions, and a few others, personal finance site Rate Rush watched both sites for two weeks and tracked who was submitting stories, which domains were getting featured on the front page, the most popular topics and words used in titles, and the velocity of links by hour and … Read more