The New Digg Arrives Ahead Of Schedule

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/31/the-new-digg-arrives-ahead-of-schedule/

by llambda • 14 years ago

96 90 14 years ago

zalew2• 14 years ago

has anyone some details to expand on it?

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

why does it even need to keep on running? Geez, just keep open the submission process, crank up the ads, and turn off everything! Digg has no clue what passive income means. They should take a page from spammers.

zalew2• 14 years ago

frankly I never cared about digg at all, but I'm always interested on the technological aspect. this bit got me curious.

Shank4• 14 years ago

I recall when Kevin Rose was interviewed prior to v4 launching, they were running the entire thing on Cassandra.

When it launched, they spent the majority of the time attempting to scale it in a quick fashion - a process which probably involved buying lots of resources and attempting to scale as fast as possible. It was badly designed from the start, and was never really fixed.

achompas3• 14 years ago

Wait, does this mean Cassandra == "outdated" by a "modern startup's" standards? I know its a couple of years old (4, says Wikipedia), but...really?

protomyth• 14 years ago

First, having to login with Facebook doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Second, am I missing the comments on stories somewhere or is it just a website where links get voted on, but no discussion occurs?

ABS• 14 years ago

1) this is the first release, after only 6 weeks 2) they are working on comments

more on their blog http://blog.digg.com/post/28441399381/welcome-to-digg-v1

fletchowns• 14 years ago

To be fair, most of the stories on the front page of digg before this most recent redesign had 0 comments anyways, so they probably realized they could push out that feature a bit.

ceslami• 14 years ago

1) By using FB, at least initially, they can lower signup friction and get a good bit of social momentum. Especially if users are sharing their "diggs" publicly. Doesn't appeal to hackers, but it works when done tastefully.

2) Discussion on digg was always a bit janky. HN really spoils the idea of social links/comments because they are so high quality here, but when you're targeting the average person, its harder to control quality. Let people sound of on Twitter/FB, and you've created a new marketing vector without directly polluting the experience on your site.

mike626• 14 years ago

I am not happy about needing to sign into Facebook and then having any story I digg showing up on my Facebook timeline.

That's an overstep that will keep me off the site.

omfg• 14 years ago

While I haven't looked into this particular scenario. You used to be able to revoke individual permissions per app / site on FB. It's under Privacy > App & Sites, obviously it defaults to on as it's convenient for the site in question. An entirely different debate.

jjrs11• 14 years ago

I think for a lot of people, being able to keep a pseudonymous identity is one of the few things that differentiates sites like reddit and digg from Facebook and twitter in the first place. Most people I know aren't crazy about letting others know what their reddit username is, let alone slapping everything they do on their Facebook feed.

vidarh2• 14 years ago

Exactly. My id here is my first name and initial. Correlating my username here with my full name, which is unique worldwide, is easy.

My Reddit id on the other hand does not directly tie to my name, and that's just how I like it.

It's still fairly easy to find - I don't care if people who really want to figure it out, as I don't write anything I can't stand for. If I wanted true anonymity I'd take a lot of extra precautions.

I just care that my Reddit comments don't show up on the first few pages of a Google search for my name, as it lets me not think as much about my "professional image".

Putting it on Facebook is something I'd never let happen.

There's a huge difference between being possible to find what I've written if you really care about it vs. it being showed in the face of my family, for example.

And this is without being part of any controversial sub-reddits. There are plenty of sub-reddits or individual threads that are offensive enough or controversial enough that I'd imagine they'd die pretty quickly if people were forced connect their Reddit identities to anything that might be directly matched to their names.

kevinSuttle• 14 years ago

From the FAQ Under 'Why Facebook [for logins]?' "We're building the Digg for 2012" - I get that like 1/13 people on the planet are on Facebook, but what about the other 12? Twitter? Or even shudder Google?

My lawd man, build your own. You restricted yourself to 6 weeks, not users.

SkyMarshal3• 14 years ago

Some discussion in the blog comments about that [1]:

>Using Facebook for account registration is a short-term solution that will seriously cut down on spam, while we take our time to develop more robust spam-filter technology. We know this isn’t ideal, so rest assured: we are working towards a more lasting solution. [2]

1. http://blog.digg.com/post/28441399381/welcome-to-digg-v1#com...

2. http://digg.com/faq#why-facebook

xSwag• 14 years ago

I guess Digg is aimed more towards general crowd now that it only allows for login with Facebook. In thier FAQ they mention it is to cut down on spam but something tells me we will never see User registration. What about people like me who do not have Facebook. I certainly do not want to make a Facebook account to use this service. Furthermore, there are a _lot_ of people who do not use it, why did they not consider this?

facorreia• 14 years ago

Maybe they'll just stick to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users, at least for now. The intersection of the sets of people that don't want a Facebook account and people that want a Digg account is probably small.

untog3• 14 years ago

Furthermore, there are a _lot_ of people who do not use it, why did they not consider this?

"A lot" is a very relative term. Non-Facebook users are probably in a minority in the kind of audience they're targeting. I think it's an interesting choice. I'm not going to say it's sensible just yet, but when they introduce comments it will be interesting to see if forcing real names brings the level of discussion up.

Shank4• 14 years ago

Their FAQ specifically addresses this.

"Using Facebook for account registration is a short-term solution that will seriously cut down on spam, while we take our time to develop more robust spam-filter technology. We know this isn’t ideal, so rest assured: we are working towards a more lasting solution."

mindstab2• 14 years ago

So they lost the ability to comment and moved further away from the reddit/HN tight text view (which they used to look like and have been steadily moving away from) and now look like a messy news page.

Is anyone else finding this new redesign even more irrelevant than ever? What does digg provide at all now? No discussion and a very messy hard way to even find anything.

yuhong• 14 years ago

The commenting will be added later.

mindstab2• 14 years ago

Let's say I were to redesign Ebay as a big picture listing site (ability to bid and buy, coming later)

Would anyone consider this a ready to launch replacement? If they don't value commenting as one the of the most core features what hope do they really have?

To me HN is more valuable for the comments then the aggregation. I often skip the article and just look at the comments. Digg cannot now compete with this and if this is their priorities: big gaudy pictures, voting, and distant third or less, commenting... well.

good luck I guess but we have different priorities on what we were hoping for and expecting and need.

thronemonkey• 14 years ago

I find it really messy and difficult to navigate as well, no idea why I should want to spend time there.

Timmy_C2• 14 years ago

It's three sections on one page. There's nowhere to navigate. You don't even leave the page to log in. I don't know how you're lost.

timdorr• 14 years ago

What is "messy" about it specifically? I don't see much mess here. Good typography and a visually-interesting layout.

donio• 14 years ago

it's too visually-interesting

skeletonjelly• 14 years ago

The whole "mason" best fit I suppose. In comparison to say reddit and HN, no real linear flow of headlines. Your eyes tend to dart all over the place with this design looking for information. The F pattern seems to be proven as the best layout for information absorption http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

bitsoda• 14 years ago

Those inline tweets are grating. The overuse of lines to delineate related content looks visually noisy. I also think the top story is given way too much space. On my 1280 x 800 display, the new Digg shows me 2.5 stories. I'd like for them to use a tighter grid so they could fit 4-5 stories above the fold on lower resolution displays.

hnriot• 14 years ago

Yes! What's not to like about it, I find the content engaging, the photos (a la Zite) interesting and the site layout looks and works well. I don't see why all these naysayers are complaining about the masonry layout. Magazines looked that way for several reasons, one of them is people seem to like the format. I'm all for sites rethinking the classic list design as we sees here in hn, it's informationaly dense (hacker news) but that only works when the domain is very specific. For Digg, the magazine look works much better. Well done Digg for having some design flair.

Timmy_C2• 14 years ago

Messy? Three articles above-the-fold and there are only three sections to the page.

thaumaturgy2• 14 years ago

I love the new design, and I love the new content. There were at least three articles there that caught my attention right away, that I stopped to read before even returning to this thread.

Content-wise, it's not the same ol' garbage that keeps getting regurgitated on Reddit, or the same ol' subjects that keep getting rehashed to death on "Hacker"News. ("PHP is a terrible language!" "No it's not!" "Yes it is!" ... yuk.)

Visually, it's not a list of links which can only draw your attention by gaming the headlines. It's about time someone re-remembered that a picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words.

As far as comments go, it's been a long time since I've been consistently enriched by reading the comments on anything anywhere. (This thread is a good example, my blathering included.) I've got my fingers crossed for Web 3.5: "Here's a nice page, shut up and enjoy your stay."

fluidcruft2• 14 years ago

I had the same reaction: yay fresh content! Although, it's a quite a but early to say whether or not the content mix will become stale.

My biggest complaint is the layout that seems to assume a huge screen or something wider than my laptop has. Scrolling left-right in addition to top-down is annoying enough for me to bounce.

vidarh2• 14 years ago

> Content-wise, it's not the same ol' garbage that keeps getting regurgitated on Reddi

I recognized most of the stories from Reddit.

gonehome• 14 years ago

I think they needed to take away the ability to comment.

Digg was a pretty awesome community in 2005 and 2006. The content was largely tech related and the comments were informative and interesting.

In 2007 it started getting worse, there were more jokes and memes and the content started to suffer. With no subreddit like system the original community began to become drowned out.

Towards the end of 2008 there was nothing left except memes and lame one line jokes that put youtube comments to shame. I was always surprised by all the people complaining about Digg v4 - the community sucked a long time before that.

I'm impressed by this revision, should be interesting to see what happens.

mkhattab• 14 years ago

To add to that, one more issue that caused me to drift away from Digg was the numerous posts/comments on sensitive topics such as religion, politics etc.

publicfig• 14 years ago

Reading the comments on the blog, I can completely understand why commenting wasn't the first thing to be implimented. They probably wouldn't put it this way, but I think they needed time for some of the less desirable user base to flee the site in order to start up again and be respected. I remember what happened after v4 was launched, and you couldn't read the comment section of any story without it being about the redesign. If you have a bunch of people complaining about a redesign instead of focusing on the content first, no one's going to even consider coming back, let alone joining for the first time.

It's no secret that the community needs a reboot, and content-first development might work for a site that through any other implementation might just strike people as a poor version of Reddit (regardless of whether or not that may be true).

petekp• 14 years ago

This looks very promising. Seems like it'd be a great place to catch up on top stories, sort of like Flipboard. Curious to see what they end up doing with commenting.

The team behind this is clearly very skilled. Will be keeping an eye on this as it evolves.

rwhitman• 14 years ago

So they really did nuke the whole thing. There's no legacy content migration, none of the user DB is intact. It seriously was just a premium domain buy. Fascinating

Shank4• 14 years ago

It's all still in their backend - they're making a tool to pull old data out. http://digg.com/archive

mcantelon• 14 years ago

The 6 week "rewrite" did sound foolhardy. Now it turns out it wasn't a rewrite, it was a replacement (a significantly quicker thing to do).

jskopek• 14 years ago

I'm all in favor of rapid releases and MVP, but this seems like a step in the wrong direction. As many have pointed out, the site is missing many of the core features required to build a community. This seems like a great way to alienate the few remaining Digg loyalists

ojbyrne2• 14 years ago

It seems to be a rebranding of News.me, rather than anything to do with digg.

adamokane• 14 years ago

I'm very interested to see what happens with this. I think they've made all the right moves so far since the acquisition and I love the transparency. They're going to try to stay true to their roots while also becoming "fast and thin", in their words.

It also makes a ton of sense to have the algorithm factor in tweets, FB shares, and diggs. Nice. I don't know if it'll ultimately work, but it looks like a good start.

quotemstr• 14 years ago

Goddammit, I hate it when sites intercept middle-clicks. Middle click means "open in new tab", not "run some badly-written open-in-new-window javascript".

jmduke• 14 years ago

I'll say this -- this looks much much better than reddit or HN on my iPhone.

But, as always, such sites' value comes more from their community than anything else.

ehynds• 14 years ago

Digging through the source reveals a konami easter egg. Unfortunately all it really does is break the page though.

steveplace• 14 years ago

This will test my theory that the success of a product launch is directly tied to how many HN users hate it.

harlanlewis• 14 years ago

Facetious and I'm sure you'll get all sorts of downvotes, but the biases of commentary groups is worth knowing.

m0nastic• 14 years ago

I'd actually been testing that theory for many months, and was all set to declare it victory when Groupon happened.

I was sure that the level of negativity on the company leading up to the IPO would pretty much assure it's success.

But I think folks have been proven to be mostly right about that (if not a little hyperbolically fatalistic).

Steko• 14 years ago

The "Groupon is a giant Ponzi scheme" conventional wisdom slingers of HN haven't been proven right about anything.

fpp• 14 years ago

Seems like old user accounts wont work any-more - instead requesting to log in with a FB account - guys just forget it right away.

but then "De mortuis nil nisi bonum" (Speak no ill of the dead)

smacktoward• 14 years ago

There's something about them calling it "Digg v1" that really annoys me. Digg version 1 was... the original Digg, no? I dunno what particular version of Digg this thing is, except that as a reboot of an existing property/brand it's obviously not version 1.

It might be their version 1, but calling it "v1" in public makes it feel like the old Soviet pictures where the leaders who had fallen out of favor were airbrushed out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Sov...). "Nyet, Comrade! Commissar Rose was never in charge of this tractor plant!"

It just feels really disrespectful to the original Digg team, at least to me.

the1• 14 years ago

original digg was v0. this is not lua

freehunter• 14 years ago

And it then went on to several more version over the years, so even if it started at 0 (which is ridiculous, this is version numbers not arrays) it would still end up at more than v1.

shaunxcode• 14 years ago

I think they mean v1 as in not beta or mvp. Also I have to admit it's good! However it is a waiting game now to see what sort of community builds around it.

xanados• 14 years ago

It's a reboot of the franchise. Just like the new Star Trek movie wasn't called "Star Trek 11" but simply "Star Trek." It would be odd to keep the same version numbering scheme when they threw away the old system, no?

ChrisNorstrom• 14 years ago

Oh no, not that "Magazine Layout" crap. I get why designers choose it, they want to make the page look lively and balance content all over the place but it's terrible for readability. It breaks natural eye flow from left to right then top to bottom. With magazine style layouts, your eyes have to go all over the place to skim through the content and that just gets annoying. If they wanted to avoid looking like a blog but still keep the lively look and feel they could have tried a grid like layout where at least the stories are aligned horizontally in a straight line.

The style itself is really nice, blocky and beautifully simple. This is how you redesign a content site, its elements are purposely made minimal, simple, and sterile so that the content stands out above everything else. The site disappears and the content takes the stage. Basically, it puts the spotlight on the performer rather than the stage. Also, the site's so lightweight that it just feels fast. Very few elements are begging for your eye's attention which is great, it allows the eyes to go straight for the image and title. Everything about the redesign is just so right, it's a shame they went for the magazine style layout.

Either way, great redesign. It's won me over, and I will actually start returning to digg to see how things go over the next few months. This was a very nice rebirth, back to simple, back to content.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

The fundamental issue with the "magazine layout" is that it is completely pointless in a digital world. The reason why magazines are laid out the way they are is because there's a limit on space, so everything has to be crammed in wherever it'll fit. When you've got a website though, there are no such restrictions, so the focus should be on presenting content in the most orderly manner.

keithnoizu• 14 years ago

well to be fair there is some constraint in how much of a site afresh impression is going to look at and the average screen size they will be using. The grid is a less applicable but there's still some advantages to displaying all of your important bits in a semi clean fashion on the landing page with out flowing to far in any direction.

bstar77• 14 years ago

I personally like magazine style layouts, but the layouts need to be context sensitive like you would see in a magazine or newspaper. Stories that are more prominent in the design should be more popular. Stories should also be grouped sensibly.

Zite does this extremely well. Pulp, on the other hand, does it pretty poorly. Doing this on Digg's homepage is going to be challenging to not look schizophrenic. But on Digg's sub-topics, this type of layout will work well. I find scanning through tabular data to be fatiguing and I often scan over items out of boredom.

bluthru• 14 years ago

A 2d (versus 1d) layout is great for items that are meant to be browsed without order. It isn't an RSS feed or your inbox where you're supposed to diligently consume each piece before moving onto the next one in chronological order.

It's leisure information, not work.

ericclemmons• 14 years ago

On my iPad, magazine layout via Flipboard is the only way I consume my content now. Because it is non-linear like Google Reader, I actually pay attention to each headline rather than skimming for key terms or phrases.

This layout for digg fits in with casual consumption and discovery, rather than a structure that encourages seeking out specific articles.

I do agree with you that this is a beautifully simple site and will also revisit on a regular basis to see how it progresses.

pacomerh• 14 years ago

The right column is the one that is confusing, looks like its a place for top news or something, however it's just another column with the same relevance, this is a little weird, just content accumulated with no context. Also, why is there no bury button on the home page, having only [digg] = [like] is boring. Overall this looks like a wordpress theme for a magazine, very tired design. I would expect more from a digg redesign.

nostromo• 14 years ago

Wow, Facebook required for sign up. Did they really throw away all of their user accounts?

twodayslate• 14 years ago

I have a facebook account but I have "deactivated" it (not deleted). I cannot use the new digg. The facebook popup shows up and then immediately disappears. This is frustrating.

lwat• 14 years ago

Looks hot but it's pretty pointless without commenting

SkyMarshal3• 14 years ago

>According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of thousands per month” to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would be considered legacy technology by a modern startup. Because of this, the new Digg team decided to throw away virtually all of the old underpinning of the site in favor of a fresh start. Borthwick wants to rebuild the company and to do so, he says, it’s important to turn it back into startup mode and develop a completely new and modern platform to develop the new Digg on.

Anyone know the tech stack they're using? Don't see anything specific on their website (blog, about, careers).

Johngibb• 14 years ago

I saw an nginx error page one of the times I hit the homepage, fwiw

duaneb3• 14 years ago

It began with PHP - I'm not sure if it was ever rewritten. However, by "the end" they were scaling with cassandra, but mostly they were throwing more hardware and people at it. Note that this is from a hazy memory.

kintamanimatt• 14 years ago

Appears they're using Python/Tornado on Amazon EC2. No idea what DB they're using.

jordanb• 14 years ago

The cost of running the site seems like a red herring. Reddit is proof that there's no technical reason why a community news site can't be run on a fraction of the cost of Digg.

The real lead here is that Digg is ceding that market entirely to Reddit. The new Digg looks more like a competitor to the Huffington Post. To be honest, I think there might just be a business there. Huffpo serves a particular market niche: predominately liberal female city dwellers and it strikes me that it may be profitable to deliver the same product to a different niche.

madprops• 14 years ago

I think it looks very clean, very nice. I also think making it a place to find interesting content to share in people's social networks, were the majority of conversations are happening, instead of making people comment in-site, was a smart move.

Kilimanjaro• 14 years ago

Oh god no, facebook login no. I bet my balls they will turn on facebook comments in a couple of weeks too.

Sorry digg, me no coming back.

austenallred• 14 years ago

I like that you can submit by tweeting"[url] tip @digg", that seems pretty slick.

Where do they get the pictures for each piece of content? Is it automatically generated from the site, or do they go through manually for stuff that reaches the front page?

JeanTouman• 14 years ago

Does this mean it will also fail ahead of schedule?

makecheck• 14 years ago

The cleaner look isn't bad but it is impossible to resize the text, even when attempting manual zooming. This is certainly not the first site to be conceited about text size but come on: this is a site for reading things and who knows better than the user what font size will be comfortable for doing that? Also, I recall something in their blog about designing "for 2012" and focusing on "the user", so where exactly does screwed-up layout fit in to those goals?

grandpoobah• 14 years ago

This new Digg is utter crap. What a waste of the Digg name. I have no words to express just how disappointed I am.

jameszol• 14 years ago

I'm having a hard time trying to find something that I like about the new Digg v1. It feels "meh" to me so far. The layout of the content makes it hard for me to digest...I already hope there is a redesign when v2 is launched.

dmix• 14 years ago

Well, I don't think any of us were expecting much and it met that expectation succinctly.

The New Digg Arrives Ahead Of Schedule

Related Stories