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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Digg.com redesign alienates users
September 23, 2010
The Internet can be a fickle creature, but if there is one lesson that seems to consistently ring true it’s this: don’t alienate your core users.
It’s a lesson that digg.com is learning the hard way. Having been a paragon of social bookmarking with over 40 million unique visitors a month at its peak, there has been a huge exodus of traffic thanks to an unpopular redesign which irritated a legion of faithful power users.
In August digg unveiled its big redesign, digg v4, which is discussed in great detail by Search Engine Land. Version 4 was intended to recalibrate the balance of power on digg, making it once again a forum of the online community rather than the domain of the 'diggerati'. As The New York Times commented, the extraordinary influence of power users made digg: “feel like a members-only club, rather than the communal product of unfettered crowdsourcing.”
Since the end of August, traffic from UK Internet users to digg has declined by 34%. In the US, which is digg’s primary market, visits have dropped by 26%.
Unhappy with the way digg has changed, many of the high profile power users publically rebelled by switching to another social bookmarking site, reddit.com. However, although the decrease in visits to digg is highly noticeable, there hasn’t been a correlating spike in traffic to reddit. During the same period of decline in the UK for digg, reddit only increased its visitors by 2.6%.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 04:29 PM
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This trend will continue even thought the reddit factor doesnt register the exodus. Many long time Diggers such as myself have split our old Digg time between sites such as SlashDot Arstechnica and Techmeme since our defection from DIgg.
Posted by Ric | September 23, 2010 06:33 PM
So where in your data are you differentiating between loggen in users and search traffic?
I covered some of the SEO issues at launch and they are still present.
Posted by Andy Beard | September 23, 2010 06:43 PM
Deceptive! While there may be a point to the graph, always initialize the dependent variable to 0 and count up from there. It is misleading to use .08% as the start mark.
Posted by Society for Logical Statistics | September 23, 2010 07:01 PM
I think its these same users that are leaving taht were limiting Digg in the first place. "Power users" really amounts to groups of people who try and control the direction of entire categories and take pride in moving stories up or down.
I always thought this was a bad thing as its the opposite of the democratic nature of the site.
But thats what happens when you try and make a site for users, some people make a "hobby" out of it and ruin it for the rest.
Posted by bob | September 23, 2010 07:02 PM
It is a petty to see digg.com drop its traffic, Kevin Rose is one of my most respected "internet guy" around. I think it is just too hard to hold up traffic when you have competitor doing similar jobs like Facebook and Twitter.com
Posted by tobiascai | September 24, 2010 02:39 AM
As I understand it, Reddit has more traffic than Digg. How much is that 2.6% worth?
Posted by Josh | September 24, 2010 05:00 AM
Hi, I'm one of the reddit admins. You don't know what you're talking about. According to Google Analytics and our own server logs, traffic from the UK is up 40% since the Digg collapse. (480,327 UK visitors per week before, 676,953 after.) Please email me if you'd like to discuss further.
Posted by Mike Schiraldi | September 24, 2010 02:34 PM
The second graph is misleading, as the base percentage on the Y axis stops at 0.008%, and not at 0.000% which is implied in the graph visualization. The numbers look much bleeker for US visitors.
You call yourself "research director"?
Posted by analystdebunker | September 24, 2010 04:13 PM
"However, although the decrease in visits to digg is highly noticeable, there hasn’t been a correlating spike in traffic to reddit."
That is flat out wrong. From a TC post -
"... the site has been averaging 900,000 uniques per day— a 50% increase from Reddit’s pre-”Digg 4″ average..."
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/02/reddit-digg-traffic-chris-slowe/
Posted by Damon | September 24, 2010 07:22 PM
There are many design mistakes, like the underline bold from links, the read more option who was created by twitter whe reddit is so simple and friendly.
Posted by Mart | September 27, 2010 01:58 PM
The option to digg through stories, images and videos looks promising
Posted by Sameer | December 29, 2010 11:31 AM
To whomever authored this article, your data set is entirely wrong as regards reddit traffic post digg v4. Reddit traffic spiked so considerably during and after digg v4 that additional servers were installed to support the massive influx of direct traffic. We show an average 46% traffic spike post v4 from CWA, GA, CEWA, CUVT, CDA, and W3CA.
Posted by Baz | January 27, 2011 02:39 AM
The reason I left Digg is due to the inane comments and hatred that became increasingly evident. It's initial strength became it's achilles heal.
Posted by booty | September 23, 2010 06:07 PM