Before, Digg followed the simple paradigm of “sort user-submitted links by the number of votes they receive.” Now, it’s trying to be something more like a cross between Slashdot and Techmeme, with a little bit of inspiration from The Verge’s design.

Stories are now ranked not just by votes, but also by the number of times they’re shared on social networking sites. If you share or like a link on Facebook, Digg considers it to be a vote. If you retweet a link on Twitter, Digg counts it as a vote. Placement on the page is determined not only by a ranking formula, though, but also by manual moderation.

The first segment of the Digg front page is made up of the highlighted stories, with their large images, but down the page you find the “Popular” and “Upcoming” sections, which will seem familiar to those who remember the old Digg. “Popular” contains the top stories by natural votes, rather than being singled-out by them moderators. Below that, the Upcoming section shows the recently submitted links.

As it stands, the new Digg isn’t a bad start. It’s less automated and democratic than a site purely driven by user votes, but the new direction may lead to better content and less image macros. One thing it’s majorly missing, however, is an RSS feed. User comments aren’t a huge deal, in fact, they were one of the worst parts of the previous incarnations of Digg.

The new Digg Version 4 changes all of that, and turns the site into a place that’s actually pleasant to use. You get a customized Twitter-style feed of the profiles you “follow,” which is sorted by the number of votes the articles receive. I had been beta testing the site for awhile, but it’s live for everyone now.

The content is better, since you have more control over what you see. And most of the posts I end up seeing have zero comments, which is also nice.

It’s easier to post new links than before, with a streamlined URL box that lets you breeze right through the process.

For us content producers, there’s a neat new feature that will take an RSS feed or two and automatically Digg anything published in it. So you can take your blogs’ feeds and have their posts automatically submitted to your profile. So you can automate the posting of your own stuff, freeing you up to submit content you find elsewhere.

Also, when you post a link to Digg it gives you an option to cross-post it to Twitter and Facebook.

I like the new Digg. I just might start using it again, now that I don’t have to put up with a bunch of foul-mouthed, Apple-bashing 13-year-olds. Just remember, don’t click the “Top News” tab to the right of the default “My News.” You will end up on a page similar to the old Digg.

If you want to give the new Digg a try, you can follow me here.

Well, the DiggBar is “evil” again.

A few days ago, Digg threw the switch on a change to how the DiggBar works. No longer do Digg short URLs (e.g. http://digg.com/u39A9h) automatically redirect to their target. They now point you to the Digg page instead of the source.

A new entry surfaced on the Digg blog a couple days later, with this explanation:

As we’ve stated in the past, the DiggBar is meant to streamline the Digg experience and provide our registered users with the opportunity to catch up on comments, related stories and additional source content. Our strategy with Digg short URLs is to facilitate sharing of Digg content, not to be a conventional redirection service.

They pulled a bait-and-switch, moving from something that made sense, and could potentially bring more traffic and content to Digg, to something that users won’t find anywhere near as useful. People want to share content, not pages that link to content.

Digg claims that the DiggBar is not a bad as people are making it out to be:

We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.

That sounds like a good idea. I checked the source code, the article links point to the original URL rather than the Digg short URL. While that’s nice of them, it doesn’t change the fact that the Digg URL is being propogated around the internet instead of the original URL, and that URL points to a page on Digg’s servers, rather than doing a simple 301 redirect, which instructs search engines to ignore the first URL and go directly to the original source. More PageRank for Digg, and none for you.

We always represent the source URL as the preferred version of the URL to search engines and use the meta noindex tag to keep DiggBar pages out of search indexes. For those of you interested in the technical details, we also include link rel=”canonical” information to indicate that the original URL is the real (canonical) version. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.

While that’s nice, Google is really the only search engine that understands the canonical URL meta tag. And when a search engine accesses a DiggBar URL, it will recieve a 200 “File Found” response, which tells it “the page you’re looking for is here,” rather than the “it’s not here, go look over on this page” message from a 301 response.

Search engine issues aside, framing off-site links still seems like a tacky 1996-era trick. And I certainly have a problem with Digg displaying ads on others’ websites. Doesn’t exactly seem fair, does it?

Further Reading

• Digg Says Diggbar is NOT Evil, And Is Lifting Unique Visitors By 20 Percent
• Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use?

That’s the controversial part: Every page loaded into the DiggBar ends up with a TinyURL-style short URL that loads the page, with the bar atop it. This means that Digg doesn’t link directly to your site anymore. They link to their short URL (e.g. http://digg.com/d1lGIm), which displays your page in a frame. If someone decides to link to your page, are they going to go through the trouble to break the page out of the frameset and link to the original URL? Probably not. They’re link to the Digg URL instead, which displays your page in the DiggBar frameset. You don’t get any link juice, and the link is dependant on Digg’s URL working.

The DiggBar may net you some more traffic, making it easier for your post to be Dugg and shared on Twitter and Facebook. (Functions for each are included in the toolbar.) I can’t say I like the downside though.

Further Reading

• Digg Launches New Toolbar – Makes Digging and Sharing Easier [ReadWriteWeb]
• Is DiggBar Twitter’s New Power Tool? [Mashable]
• DiggBar Keeps All Digg Homepage Traffic On Digg [TechCrunch]

But really, is it worth it?

Most of you have probably already learned that it’s hard to get Dugg. It doesn’t happen very often, unless you’re one of the few sites that seem to be perpetually on the front page, and you’re better off just focusing on your website, and hoping it will happen some day on it’s own.

Do you want to get Dugg though? Sure, it’s a nice ego boost, and you may get a few subscribers out of it, but studies have shown that Digg traffic is of very low quality. You get people just looking for some quick entertainment. You won’t gain many subscribers, you likely won’t have any comments (or intelligent comments anyway) added, any ads you have will likely be ignored or blocked entirely, and the sudden rush of traffic will fade away in hours. Fun, but it will cost you in bandwidth, with little return, save for some impressive statistics.

Also, Digg is full of jerks. It seems that the place has been devolving into a wasteland full of trolls. Comment threads turn into flame wars pretty quick over there. All of the Apple-bashing especially has been getting on my nerves. Users clinging to outdated myths, sketchy claims, and lame recycled arguments loudly slam Apple, and bury comments with some sense or facts to them. If you don’t like Apple, go into your preferences and turn the “Apple” category off instead of ruining the site for the rest of us.

I just haven’t been very happy with Digg lately. I’ve never seen one of my posts get more than 80 Diggs (not enough to make it out of Upcoming), my inbox gets flooded with “Shouts” that vary wildly in quality, and the quality of the Popular section’s entries just isn’t up to snuff these days. (Not to mention the rampant trolling in the comments!) I spend too much time reading and voting on other people’s submissions when I could be doing something more productive.

What’s your take on the current state of Digg? Is it worth visiting at all anymore? I’m real close to sticking to my RSS feeds for news, and Reddit and StumbleUpon for what Digg used to be for…finding new and interesting stuff.

I don’t get it.

Sure, the site is new and shiny. But they have nothing on Digg so far.

• Users of Yahoo Buzz can only vote on stories, they cannot submit them.
• Only select sites can have their articles featured (read: really big blogs). Yahoo says they are in beta, and are currently not accepting publisher applications.
• I doubt Yahoo will ever let smaller sites be featured. They’ll most likely keep it weighted towards the bigger sites, with some lame excuse like “all the traffic would kill your site!”

I admit that the potential traffic from Yahoo Buzz is great. As Daily Blog Tips pointed out:

TechCrunch recently published a post revealing the initial traffic details of Yahoo! Buzz. Salon.com reported over one million visitors to a story that was featured on the front page of Buzz. Confirming that number The Huffington Post claimed that they received around 800,000 visitors from the site as well.

My shared hosting definitely wouldn’t stand-up to traffic like that (heck, even Ars Technica has been running slower lately, no doubt from being in the Yahoo Buzz program). But I think most bloggers would agree that they would want the traffic anyway. Hosting issues can be taken care of, and isn’t it a well-known fact that the average Yahoo user is more likely to click ads than most web users?

Besides, by cutting-out smaller blogs, and by using a closed system requiring publishers to be approved before their stories can be submitted (which I have no doubt they will continue using), Yahoo Buzz will never be a true competitor to Digg. The best part of Digg is that any old blog can make it to the front page. If someone has good content that the users will respond to, the article can make it to the front page, uninhibited by restrictions set by the site.

Here’s my idea of how it should work…

If Yahoo is so worried about bringing down people’s shared hosting accounts, they should keep their opt-in publishing scheme, but not have an approval process. In order to have the possibility of having your stories featured, you should have to apply. That way you can’t complain if your server goes down, and anyone would be able to have their article submitted.