Paywalls were a popular April Fool’s Day subject, as Digg followed up the paywall that exclusively targeted employees of The New York Times and Winnipeg residents, “announced” earlier Friday by The Huffington Post Media Group president and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington, with its own take on the concept: the reverse paywall.
Digg finally officially addressed the rumors and speculation about the departure of founder and Diggnation host Kevin Rose (pictured) that surfaced late last week in a blog post by CEO Matt Williams, in which he emphasized that Rose’s role had not changed since he stepped back from day-to-day decisions last September. Highlights:
We’ve been hearing a lot about how Kevin Rose is launching something new. Everyone knows Kevin is an entrepreneur at heart, and he’s had many projects in the works over the past several years. We’re excited to see what he comes up with next. Kevin continues to be committed to Digg’s success; his role as founder, board member, and Diggnation host remains unchanged. When I took over as CEO last September, Kevin stepped back from the day-to-day decisions. I’m proud of the great team we’ve got at Digg, and they’re the ones to credit for the changes you’ve seen and the new direction we’re pursuing.
When I joined Digg, we had just released a product that was not ready for primetime. It really upset our users. Over the first few months, we dropped in the number of daily visitors and page views. But through this crisis, the lines of communication between Digg and our users opened to unprecedented levels. We received tens of thousands of comments and suggestions from the Digg community about how to restore the site they loved.
Digg released another series of updates, which include the ability to filter My News by activity type, an updated site header for searching, and a better About site with improved navigation. More from software engineer Will Larson via the Digg Blog:
When a user logs into Digg for the first time, they are now taken directly to their My News Trending page, filled with the most active stories on Digg. Above the list of stories is a brief explanation of how to get started on Digg with links to our more comprehensive explanation on about.digg.com (We have also made a “Getting Started on Digg” video, which will be included soon). All other components of onboarding have been moved into modules on the right column.
To increase quality in the initial experience, we released My News Trending. My News Trending has a major feature that accounts for the improved experience: It is always full of stories. This means that even if you are a brand new user who hasn’t followed a soul or Dugg a story, you will immediately find interesting and timely content.
We developed a module framework for the right column that customizes modules by examining the current user and page. So rather than asking users to immediately pick people to follow and social networks to connect, those steps are spread out over multiple modules. Since only a few modules are ever shown on any given page, the onboarding is distributed over a longer time, reducing friction. Now users can take their time tuning their Digg experience, rather than attempting a huge setup and configuration the first time they create an account and log in.
Digg announced that it filled its vacant vice president of engineering post with Ben Folk-Williams, who had held the same title with Vast for the past four years.
Prior to Vast, Folk-Williams led engineering at Coremetrics.
Digg CEO Matt Williams said:
This has been our most important role to fill at Digg. We were looking for someone who has led the development of a scalable platform, built strong teams, demonstrated operational excellence for website performance, and has a history of developer-driven product innovation. We came across Ben and realized he fits all of those qualities, and many more — including being a longtime Digg user.
Ben has been coding since fourth grade, loves big data problems and high-volume websites, and can often be seen in coffee shops in the Mission district (and now walking over to Potrero!).
Folk-Williams added:
Digg has fantastic fundamentals — a great brand, 20 million monthly uniques, with a very passionate core community, committed investors, and an exceptional team. Digg is uniquely positioned to redefine how people discover news, and it’s great to be a part of that.
Digg refuses to stand pat, announcing another wave of updates in a post by software engineer Will Larson on the Digg Blog.
All Digg users have been migrated to its new design. A new trending order was created for My News, mixing in the most active content from Top News to prevent shortages of content.
The Who Dugg This module is easier to find, as are the Top Comments from the previous day, thanks to redesigned modules. And the Find People page also underwent a revamp.
Digg continues to reinvent itself, announcing the rollout of new features, a bug fix, and other changes in a post by software engineer Will Larson on the Digg Blog. Highlights:
When we launched Digg V4, one of the new features was allowing users to link RSS or Atom feeds with their accounts. After being linked, new stories from those feeds would be automatically submitted; the effect was identical to a user submitting those stories by hand. We believed this new feature would bring more great content to Digg. What we didn’t account for was the tremendous impact feed submissions would have on both content discoverability and Top News quality.
As the release cooled down, discussion about the impact of automated submission picked up. Feedback came from the Digg community letting us know that our users had concerns about how feed submissions had changed Digg. In addition to community comments, we started collecting some numbers…and those numbers are in: 95.5 percent of stories on Top News come from manual submission.
Most weekdays, only one to three stories that reach Top News are submitted by feeds. Worse, we were routinely finding fantastic stories submitted from feeds that weren’t getting as much attention as similar stories from manual submission.
After measuring the numbers and deeply considering the Digg community’s feedback, we felt the best course for everyone was to stop feed submissions entirely.
Digg announced the rollout of three new features: a new design; displaying users’ historical number of and percentage of stories promoted to Top News; and optional on-site and email notification when stories are promoted.
The changes will be rolled out to about 15 percent of logged-in users Monday, software developer Will Larson wrote on the Digg Blog, with all users gaining access over the next several weeks.
Larson wrote:
This new design includes a new way to browse between the different sections of the site and an easier way to filter your content. We’ve simplified the design to make stories more prominent and easier to read. The newly organized profile page makes it a snap to see all of your statistics. And last but not least, a new submission flow makes submitting stories easier. We couldn’t wait any longer to share these with our users and gather feedback before a public rollout, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Since launching V4, we’ve been working on importing data from V3 into our new system. It’s ended up taking much longer than we expected, and today’s push will reveal two important statistics: the number of stories each user has had promoted to Top News, and the percentage of stories they have submitted that have reached Top News.
Ever wonder about the social media demographics on different social sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon MySpace, Ning and Reddit ? The Infographic below takes a detailed look at who is using which sites. The Infographic is created by Flowtown and was generated using data from Google Ad Planner.
The latest installment of Digg Dialogg will feature someone quite familiar around Digg headquarters: CEO Matt Williams.
Questions can be submitted to Williams as comments on his post on the Digg Blog through Thursday at 9 a.m. PT, and the full interview will be posted Tuesday, Feb. 1, at noon. Williams wrote:
Over the past four months since I’ve joined Digg, our team has been committed to staying connected with our community. From San Francisco to Serbia, we’ve received tens of thousands of comments and suggestions. I’ve also had the chance to meet in person with many longtime users of Digg, through lunch gatherings and focus groups in a few different cities.
We’ve been listening closely to your feedback, and the result is a number of changes to Digg.com — such as reinstating buries, bringing back the Upcoming section, adding filters to browse images and videos more easily, and launching an improved mobile site. We’re hard at work on other features and site design changes you’ve requested, so stay tuned.
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts on how to make Digg.com great. Please keep it coming.
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