The newest SU update removes all direct links. Previously, once you were inside StumbleUpon, you could "X" out the page and go straight to the original site. Now if you're logged in, you have to say in the iframed version of the site. There is one way to get out, but it's super clunky.

As you can see, there's no "X" option. If you want to go to the direct link, you'll have to copy and paste out the link above and delete the StumbleUpon URL. Here's what one of those clunky SU link looks like:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1PrjAd/www.modernarttimeline.com/

Would you really take the time to copy and paste the tail of that link into another tab or browser? That's what it'll take to get the direct URL.

StumbleUpon is trying to build up its ecosystem, keeping users inside rather than sending them out to the Web and other social sites. By keeping everyone inside, StumbleUpon will no longer offer prized SEO value that it once did. This will negatively affect referral traffic, especially for sites that rely on StumbleUpon for that nice traffic jolt.

Remember when this happened at Digg? Users revolted, and then-CEO Kevin Rose decided to make the DiggBar optional. Rose even said that framing content "is bad for the Internet."

Digg launched its very own social reader on Facebook in late December 2011. Now, 2 million impressions later, it's adding new features that it believes Facebook-Diggers (or maybe it should be Digg-Facebookers?) will enjoy. This announcement comes on the same day as the Facebook open graph rollout, and ties into Facebook's vision of a frictionless sharing future.

As with other frictionless sharing apps, the social reader doesn't force everyone to share everything. Users publish on a per story basis, and can also choose what they share - submissions but not comments, diggs but not submissions, for example. The social reader gives users more control, with an ability to turn the social reader off from the Digg newsbar, or edit story activity to Timeline and the Activity Log after the fact. The reader makes a distinction between stories that readers digg versus stories that readers read.

But do any of these things matter? Digg is trying to regain the control it lost after Kevin Rose's departure nearly one year ago. In October 2011, it added social newsrooms, re-inventing it as a real-time, game-driven news room. Gone are the days of simple up-voting and down-voting. The once most-popular online news site is still struggling to catch up. Will it?

This new feature smooshes together your Facebook social graph and your Digg social graph, two social sets that might not really have much in common. This is yet another attempt at making Digg more social, following on the heels of Digg's real-time newswire and social newsrooms, which function like topical channels curated by users. Will this new feature help Digg get back into social news?

Digg decided to launch this new feature after it found that fans of the Digg Facebook page were visiting top Digg stories more regularly than its actual users. In fact, Digg tells us that logged-in Facebook users spent more time on the site - an average of 15 minutes vs. 10 minutes for the average user.

After users turn social sharing on from the Digg side (see above), all stories that a user reads on Digg will appear in the Facebook news ticker and news feed.

The Digg Social Reader on Facebook will roll out slowly.

After its re-design, the departure of founding CEO Kevin Rose and the eulogy that many have already written for it, this seems like a feeble attempt at getting back in. It seems like Digg is handing over what was once its prize - power users and control of social news - to Facebook.

Newsrooms display an activity feed showing Diggs and buries by individual users in the newsroom. They also implement the Newswire, released in August, which surfaces more stories and user activity. Digg has gone all in with the complete overhaul it launched last year to make Digg more social, despite user uprisings and declining traffic influence. Newsrooms are part of the effort to double down. Can Digg pull it off?

Making Digg More Social

Newsrooms are the latest in a series of major product updates at Digg to reinvent it as a real-time, game-driven news room. The original Digg aggregated news using a simple, democratic system of user up-votes and down-votes. The contributions of individual users were not as important as the mass effect. Digg was easily gamed, though, and its influence began to suffer from the karma-driven system at Reddit, not to mention the massive network effects of Facebook and Twitter.

Digg had to completely reinvent itself, and it had to do so without founder and former CEO Kevin Rose, who left the company shortly after the launch of its controversial version 4. Digg's new angle was to make news curation more social and reputation-driven. Many old Digg users were not pleased. But Digg has remained committed to this approach, as is evident from Newsrooms. The process of surfacing content on Digg now relies heavily on the personalities of its users.

Getting Stronger Signals

Newsrooms pull in outside social signals from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to determine rankings. They also rely on the reputations of Digg users who have voted on the story. Users are then rewarded with badges and ranked on a leaderboard within the Newsroom. These are intense, almost competitive social features that Digg users of yore would hardly recognize.

But the interesting part about Newsrooms is that they work behind the scenes. The Digg front page still looks like the old one, concentrating on the stories themselves and their numbers of Diggs. Newsrooms are a way for Digg to generate more churn and improve the quality of the site-wide listings while also helping users look deeper for content by topic. The social features are there to keep the power users busily curating.

A Social Web Assembly Line

Newsrooms are also tuned to surface content that doesn't yet have many Diggs or is automatically pulled from outside Digg. They display those stories on the Newswire and the Newsroom page to get Newsroom followers to work on them, surfacing them to more Digg users and funneling them toward the front page.

It's an intricate model, almost like a social Web assembly line, and it gives motivated Digg users plenty to do. Digg has widened its stance and distinguished itself more clearly with this update. We'll see if badges and rankings are enough to motivate Digg users to work as a team.

Check out our old 2006 interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose for an interesting look into how far Digg has come.

Do you think badges, leaderboards and other game mechanics are good motivations for Web users? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Today the site added a big new feature it thinks could help: a highly customizable, real time Newswire. Want to see the freshest videos about technology that have been validated enough to get 10 or more Diggs but aren't so popular that they've been dugg more than 50 times? Text posts about business with more than 50 Diggs? Those kinds of views are now easy to set up and read in real time. That's just one of several several big new features that went live on the site this morning.

Long a subject of controversy, there's now a new level of visibility into who has voted to bury a story, when the burying is done in the Newswire. Votes up and down performed in the more transparent Newswire environment now carry more weight than votes performed elsewhere on the site, too.

"Over the coming weeks and months," writes Digg's Will Larson (formerly of Yahoo BOSS) in the announcement, "the core ideas (rewarding transparency, showing real-time content and activity, increasing visibility of how actions impact story ranking) will be spreading across the rest of Digg."

Those are fundamental changes to the way news is shared. Where else online can readers exercise this degree of granular control over what parts of the social stream they want to read? Twitter Lists, perhaps, but the criteria there are qualitative, not quantitative like this. Where else online does content sharing come with extra benefits if you're willing to attach your name to it? And where, other than on Facebook and Twitter - two sites that aren't really about news consumption per se - do updates get pushed to the reader in real time?

Nowhere I can think of. I think these are very interesting new features in the social news world.

I was able to find a lot of content using this system that I was genuinely excited to see uncovered.

Can feature changes like this turn the tide of declining traffic? Maybe. If it works, it will likely catch much of the tech media by surprise. Today's Newsfeed announcement was made five hours ago, and I saw coverage of it exactly nowhere, until coming across an article by Lucy Gee on the blog Walyou this afternoon.

Below, a very cool looking TED Talk video that I found by tweaking the new settings on the Newswire today. Thanks Digg!

Lacy articulates one perspective on the news very well. It really is just one, very rosy, perspective though. "Revisionist history, if there ever was one," Tweeted Guardian-exited media industry scribe Rafat Ali about Lacy's article. Lacy's coverage is good from the perspective she comes from, as a writer of compelling business narratives, but there's more to the whole story of Digg than that. Here's a little more to consider.

Digg still sees millions of visitors every month, but traffic and site activity seem to be dropping fast. It's as good a time as any to take a look at the site's history.

The Business End Was More Complicated Than We Might Remember as Well

Here's the meat and potatoes of Lacy's characterization of Digg:

"Digg has always represented the spirit of the early Web 2.0 movement to me. Facebook has never been the emblematic company of the Web's mid-2000 resurgence, because it has always been such an outlier from the pack. But Digg- like Delicious, Six Apart, Flickr, YouTube and others- was one of those messy, risky companies founded at a time when no one was ready to believe in the Web again. The scars from the 2000 bust were too deep. These companies weren't celebrated like Web startups today- they were mocked. People thought the founders were delusional.

The entrepreneurs were the exact opposite of the kids today seduced by the promises of Y Combinator, easy cash of super angels and lure of TechCrunch headlines. They were doing something that still stank of broken dreams and evaporated billions. And they were doing it for one simple reason: they couldn't stop themselves...

...Digg helped transform how we consume media. While media properties balked at the idea in 2006, share buttons litter the Web today. We no longer rely on media gatekeepers for news. No one tells us what the front page should be- we create our own with the help of our friends.

That scrappy story is moving, and I wouldn't want to go toe to toe with Lacy debating its validity, but I can't help but note that any mockery of Digg as a long-shot pipe dream was probably mitigated by the fact that Jay Adelson, a 3-time company founder (in one case of a billion dollar firm), joined Digg as its CEO in February 2005 - just two months after the company was launched.

Twelve months after Digg was founded, the company announced it had raised almost $3 million from a group of all-star investors: Valley Godfather and early Google backer Ron Conway, Netscape co-founder and leading investor Marc Andreesen, LinkedIn founder and friend to Valley golden boys galore Reid Hoffman, eBay co-founder Pier Omidyar's Omidyar Network and several other equally impressive investors. If that's what it looked like to be mocked in 2005, I'd hate to see what egomania praise might have lead to.

Above: Rose tells the world about Digg weeks after it launched on the popular TV show Screen Savers he co-hosted, without mentioning the fact that it was his own site. Screen Savers was a big deal in the mid 2000's: it was part of a network acquired by Comcast and was full of future stars. Rose replaced Leo Laporte on the network, for example.

So in some ways yes, Digg was a big disruptive outsider in the world's media; but the other side of the same coin was that it was also part of the Silicon Valley elite insiders' game.

The Truly Messy Culture of Digg

What was the culture of Digg like? Its readers and power users sent a whole lot of traffic to ReadWriteWeb, that's for sure. We didn't spend much time in the Digg comments section discussing those stories, but we were sure appreciative for the readership.

How did things work behind the scenes at that ostensible birth-place of democratically selected daily news? It wasn't always so pretty. I'll repost below my May 17th, 2008 article about infighting and influence peddling at Digg.

MrBabyMan: Digg Users Revolt, Against the One Pure Man at the Top

Andrew Sorcini lives in Los Angeles, works as an animator for Disney and is the most powerful user that social news site Digg.com has ever seen. Known at Digg and elsewhere as MrBabyMan, Sorcini has submitted a site-leading 2,400+ stories that have hit the site's coveted front page. Those front page submissions have delivered an estimated 50 million pageviews to the sites the submissions came from. A good number of those submissions have been RWW articles, and we appreciate that. [The image on the left is MrBabyMan's avatar on Digg and elsewhere.]

For months, a small but outspoken number of Digg's millions of other users have complained about seeing as many as three or four MrBabyMan submissions on the front page at one time. As we write this he has two front page stories. Those successes are outshined, however, by the most popular story on Digg Friday night: a cartoon accusing MrBabyMan of stealing stories from smaller Digg users.

Just before noon on Friday, Sorcini submitted the image on the left to Digg. An obtuse critique of the US Federal Government's economic stimulus plan, the image was apparently on the minds of more people than just MrBabyMan. Just after noon the image on the right was posted by Kimberly Vogt, a software engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Security, girlfriend of Digg QA Analyst Jeremy McCarthy a Digg employee other than McCarthy and a rare non-employee to have reciprocal friendships with many of the top staff at Digg.

Innocent enough, right? It was submitted in the humor category and Vogt now says the image was submitted "all in good fun."

Either way, it provided an opportunity for angry Digg users to lash out at MrBabyMan. At 7:30 Sorcini posted a message to Twitter reading: "If this is how the majority of the Digg community feels, I'll quit. I won't be a part of a group that doesn't want me" - with a link to the critical, remixed cartoon.

By eight o'clock that evening the Vogt submission hit the front page of Digg - two hours before MrBabyMan's original submission went popular. At midnight a link to Sorcini's Twitter message hit the front page with the title "MrBabyMan Might Quit Digg?" By the time the bars closed Friday night more than 2000 people had voted for Vogt's cartoon and there were 750 comments left between the two negative posts. Vogt's was the most popular of all submissions made to the site on Friday. A heated debate raged in comments between Digg users of every degree of psychological maturity and perspective on the issue that you can imagine: should MrBabyMan go or should he stay?

The Charges Against the BabyMan

There are a number of criticisms that Digg users levy against Andrew Sorcini. The primary one, which Vogt's cartoon remix refers to, is that MrBabyMan submits duplicate stories that other Diggers have submitted, knowing that his superior prowess will eliminate any chance that the original submission will hit the front page.

The next criticism is that MrBabyMan uses an unfairly large network of friends and spam-like "shouts" to garner favors and give his submissions an artificial momentum that they don't warrant on merit alone.

Finally, it's frequently whispered that MrBabyMan and other top Digg users are being paid for submitting stories. There are certainly people willing to pay them.

MrBabyMan and Friends Respond

Criticism reaching this peak really upset Sorcini. He and a group of friends who often engage in hours-long group chats on Skype decided to write up a summary of the situation and see if they could find someone to write about it. A contact brought them me. I spoke with the group of six people for more than 3 hours late Friday night.

MrBabyMan's friends say that top digg users never knowingly repost something someone else already has unless the initial post is poorly submitted and not doing well. MrBabyMan says he never sends shouts to promote his stories and he doesn't get paid for what he does on Digg. The relationship between submission, promotion and money is more complex than simple pay for diggs, though.

I came away from the conversation with a number of conclusions. The dominant one is this. Andrew Sorcini's MrBabyMan persona is sitting at the top of a small network of loyal friends, made up of people like SEO marketers, PR agents turned would-be social media experts and other unsavory folk. That circle is further surrounded by an even larger network of millions of Digg users who try to have fun on the site but also wish they could find success there. Many of them no doubt wish they too could find a way to make a living in the snake-oil filled circus that is "new media marketing," as many of the top Digg users have done.

In the middle of all this mess, though, MrBabyMan is one of the most warm hearted, genuine and in many cases naive people that you will meet anywhere. The Emperor is the only one wearing clothes.

Is He Gaming the System?

MrBabyMan says he has added friends to help promote stories because that's how the rules work, if he didn't need to do that he wouldn't. He believes that most of his critics are new users who haven't had enough experience yet to know how the site works. He says he's totally accessible and can be reached by anyone who wants to talk to him - though he didn't know that the email addresses on his profile were visible only to his friends until it was pointed out to him in our conversation.

"All I ever wanted," he said, "was just for the stories to live or die on their own merits. If everyone was on a level playing field I would love that - because I still have the skills to find the great stories...I'm not complaining about the algorithm, but I don't want to be vilified for working within the parameters of it."

Money and Digg

While Sorcini's editorial genius has put him in a place of total dominance over a site that symbolizes success for a world of marketers facing disruption of traditional media - MrBabyMan is one of the few people in the upper echelon of the Digg community whose income is completely unrelated to his activities there.

While mid-tier Diggers are far more likely to be engaging in pure pay-for-play, other people at various points in the hierarchy are building careers as "new media experts." The experience that lands them the consulting contracts they live on? A demonstrated history of success in promoting stories on sites like Digg. These people aren't being paid to Digg stories - they are being paid to do other things (like advising on social media strategy) because of their success on Digg. There may be nothing wrong with that (this author has a private consulting practice in vaguely related matters as well) but to claim that top Digg users invest as much time and energy into the site as they do entirely "for the love of it" and "to share good stories with people" - with no economic incentive, short or long term, is a cynical joke.

MrBabyMan may be one of very few people in the upper echelon for whom that is the case. He says he does no outside consulting and gets no payment for his activities on Digg. He's got a good job working as an illustrator for Disney. You could say the man helps create fairy tales on Digg, as well. The story of the democratically based user generated news site, driven by people in it for the love of the community, may be one fairy tale Sorcini helps propagate.

Surprisingly, the man doesn't have the sense to monetize what he does do online very well at all. He's the host for the excellent social media podcast The Drill Down, where the most successful users on sites like Digg discuss what's in the news and often news about the social media sites themselves. A small audience of rabid, new media savvy listeners get The Drill Down as a podcast or watch it streamed live on UStream video.

That's genuinely not what it's about for MrBabyMan, he's not in it for the money. He just likes Digg, and he probably likes all the power he's got at the site - even if he does have to fend off a hostile cartoon from National Security geeks who happen to be a Digg employee's girlfriend sometimes.

He's human, too, so sometimes he fudges a little. "The only promotion I do," he said, "is Digging the stories my friends submit and keeping the chain of Digging going. That's the same thing everyone does and that's the system Digg has set up." Blind digging of friends' stories because they're your friends' stories, if that's what Sorcini is talking about, is frowned upon as contrary to the supposed essence of the site.

Generally speaking, Andrew Sorcini appears to be honestly dedicated to delivering value to the people of the Digg community. By being an entirely un-paid player in the game - he may be almost the only person in his circle whose exclusive motivation is benevolent. There's nothing wrong with making a living as a social media expert, though the term tends to be very loosely defined, but in their revolt against the financially incentivized, conspiratorial gaming of social news - those unhappy Digg users may have picked the least logical target in the guy at the top. There's no shortage of creeps in that scene but by all indications, MrBabyMan isn't one of them.

Is the kind-hearted MrBabyMan just a patsy for a shadowy world of less honest Digg power users? Is part of his job as top dog to be the fall guy when mass user distaste of other peoples' influence peddling and grey-hat tactics needs a scape goat? All of that seems possible. More likely, though, there's no one way to look at this story. The only constant, when I look at these events from different perspectives, is that Andrew Sorcini is a uniquely valuable member of the Digg community - whether they always appreciate him or not.

What was once a quiet forum has been disrupted, for better or worse as power users such as Louis Gray (and the other usual suspects) brought their large followings. This seems to skew the dynamics of the site:

• several people notice the power users' answers,
• these answers will receive considerably more votes than anyone else participating in the discussion,
• other users add their grains of salt, either to get attention or simply to join the conversation,
• the quality of replies tends to decrease, since by definition not everyone is an expert.

It would be unfair to criticize influencers for driving interest in the service. In the case of more casual services such as Friendfeed or Google Buzz, the added flow is clearly beneficial.

But this is different for a service that thrives on quality rather than quantity. What can be done to Quora's mechanics to prevent noise?

There are several ways around this problem. SomethingAwful is known for charging its members to participate in its forums. This has the merit of filtering out trolls and passive users. ASmallWorld relies on referrals to create the impression of a tight-knit network. Wikipedia has a group of administrators who are selected from among its most active and reliable contributors.

Restricted voting, Posting Limits

However, these alternatives might be perceived as drastic by the community. They might not even work in this case. What possible solutions would fit Quora's DNA? Giving users a call to action might be a different approach. For example: showing questions that need more followers, encouraging users to add questions in topics that are not active, or to add questions or tag friends to certain topics. One way to de-clutter the feed would be to separate questions, votes, answers and friend activity, which would make top users appear less frequently.

On Quora, quality means more readable answers from insightful people. It might make sense to limit the amount of answers one can post in a day. Voting is another thing to consider: On Digg, the friend following feature led to an oligarchy where a few power-users such as MrBabyMan would dominate the front page.

To avoid this, why not restrict voting only to people who follow and have contributed to a topic? Maybe also limit or group the amount of posts by one person in the feed at one time? Or why not make answers anonymous? If all else fails, maybe they should request that influencers vote up one humanitarian post per day!

Should Quora become more democratic or try to remain an aristocracy? As I explained in a previous post, the startup community is a meritocracy, so it might make sense to build a system that reflects it. This millennia-old question has no simple answer. What better place than Quora then to ask: How do you think the it should evolve?

Former ReadWriteWeb writer Frederic Lardinois wrote up the numbers on his personal blog Newsgrange (we miss you, Frederic!) and said he did not believe that Digg's troubles this year were the cause of Reddit's growth. But I think it's hard to believe that wasn't a major factor. Digg has long been the much bigger social news site but has slowed to a crawl after users grew unsatisfied with changes made by management seeking to make the site more democratic, more personalized and more mainstream. The resulting exodus couldn't help but have contributed at least some growth to Reddit, a site that's very similar in function if very different in tone. Either way, the moral of the story may be that social news, voted on by users in aggregate, is not dead.

Meanwhile, things at Reddit tend to have a very different tone and that was evident in the year-end round up. Reddit users pride themselves in their generosity towards the rest of the world. The site raised almost a million dollars for Haiti and other global crises this year. It also began a new program wherein users can donate their activity data on the site to independent researchers, something which thousands chose to do and which we wrote about enthusiastically in October as a potential model for all other social sites.

While comparisons with Digg are hard to avoid (Digg was bigger, is far more juvenile, into cults of personality, swamped with spam-for-hire sleaze-bags, antagonistic towards women, unsuccessful in building niche communities and without an attractive mobile site) it's only fair to acknowledge that building sites like these is much harder than it might appear. Yahoo's Digg copy-cat site Buzz, for example, was heralded as the game-ending giant entry into this market when it was launched two and a half years ago but the December announcement of its pending closure warranted less than a sniffle compared to the uproar about Yahoo saying it was closing social bookmarking service Delicious.

For reference, the 800 million monthly pageviews Reddit saw in December is the same number that Netscape.com was seeing in 2006 when AOL decided to turn it into a social news Digg-competitor. That effort angered Netscape news portal users, who revolted until the social news effort was moved to Propeller.com, itself just a memory now.

Meanwhile, Reddit keeps getting better and much, much bigger. Or, if this was as they say on Reddit too long didn't read, here's how the team summarizes the news: "2010 was a great year for reddit, and 2011's gonna be so awesome it'll make 2010 look like 2009."

The email notifications will now give you more information about the people you follow, specifically when they comment or Digg a story you've already taken action on. And the on-site notifications will give a little broadcast icon next to your profile image. Clicking on the icon will give you a drop-down with the five most recent notifications.

You might want to adjust your settings if you're an avid Digg user and/or you have a lot of followers, as the default settings may mean you get a lot of email.

Digg says it is considering some additional updates, including notifications when a story you submit gains a certain number of Diggs or when someone you follow submits a story. But Digg is looking for feedback before making any more changes, which considering some of the dust-up surrounding its recent changes, is probably a good thing.

As far as we can see, these editors' decisions won't directly affect the content that appears on the front page, but their recommendations will surely influence the stories that the Digg community will vote for. After all, these modules are in a very prominent position on the most popular pages on Digg.

Votes, Algorithms and Editors: Taking the Hybrid Approach

This approach is similar to how the popular tech news aggregator Techmeme handles breaking news stories. While Techmeme's algorithms decide most of the content that appears on the site's front page, a group of editors also ensures that breaking news stories are posted to the site as quickly as possible. Asked about Digg's new approach, Techmeme's founder Gabe Rivera told us that he believes that "all bottom up approaches for surfacing news like voting and link analysis can benefit from curation from the top. Voters and linkers are critical, but they mainly care about the stories they're pushing or writing about, not the overall mission of the news aggregator, which isn't their job."

Will This Help Digg to Get Back on Its Feet?

The recent launch of Digg v4 quickly turned into a major disaster for the site, as as the new infrastructure turned out to be rather fragile and unhappy users decamped to other sites. Throughout this time, though, the Digg team continued to state that it wants to make the site a more interesting destination for mainstream users. By adding a more curated experience that can break stories faster, Digg could be on its way to achieving this goal.

How Will Digg's Users React?

On the other hand, though, Digg's power users are extremely sensitive when it comes to anything that looks like it could manipulate the site's democratic voting system and the editorial team now wields a lot of influence over which stories get popular and which sites get traffic from Digg. We will have to see how Digg's users react to this, but the first reactions from the site's users are actually quite positive.

Will developers go for it? Though Digg's currency appears to be dropping fast, real-time streaming data from millions (?) of social media users, concerning links to content from all around the Web, has got to hold some interest for programatic analysis, UI innovation and publishing industry analytics. The flow of data coming through the API seems a little anemic, though. We spoke with some of the Web's leading data developers who see today's announcement in very different ways.

(Disclosure: Musser's blog is now owned by Alcatel-Lucent, who is also a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)

The Upside

Pete Warden, independent social graph analysis consultant, is optimistic for what this means to the ecosystem of mashup-friendly startups.

"Despite its recent troubles, Digg is still a massively popular tool for uncovering new stories. Offering a streaming API opens up all sorts of possibilities for mining that data, everything from spotting up-and-coming stories to offering detailed real-time analytics to content publishers. I know that startups like OneTrueFan are already salivating over what they'll be able offer."

Likewise, Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead said today that he hopes to incorporate the new Digg streaming API into his much-anticipated new startup DataSift. "Our curation abilities on top of Digg submissions would be very powerful," he told us.

The Downside

Is Digg's community exciting enough for it to still matter, though? Jeremie Miller, inventor of the Jabber/XMPP real-time/instant messaging protocol, is not so sure.

"Honestly, my gut instinct was 'digg is struggling to be relevant.' They should have published approximate flow rates with this too; some sparkly graph eyecandy woulda been nice diggs-per-second, etc. The stream is showing a flow rate of a few per second at best - Twitter's firehose is 500-1000 per second.

"Technically, their implementation definitely trumps Twitter's... whose firehose is about as un-sexy as it gets. Digg did a better job at that for sure - but it was such a low bar already.

"The only firehose I'd be surprised by and care about at this point would be Facebook's - but I expect we'll have first contact before that happens."

What Does it Mean for Digg?

If a wide range of third party startups and innovators can make meaningful use of Digg's streaming API, that could help form a virtuous circle that makes Digg more interesting to people again. If nothing substantial comes of the API, that doesn't bode well.

Witness, for example, the case of OneRiot. OneRiot is a well-funded real-time search service that put a whole lot of eggs in the basket of its ambitious API earlier this year. It's unclear that was effective in making OneRiot really stand out, though - and now the technically admirable, world-changing startup has put its tail between its legs this month and turned entirely into an advertising network.

Something like that may very well happen to Digg. Or, a streaming API could help make Digg hip and fun again.

What do you think, readers?

As with many sites, we continuously run tests on the site to expose vulnerabilities in our own security. In this case, we did have a number of our internal test accounts Digging content from the Upcoming section of the site. We learned a great deal about some vulnerabilities in how users can inappropriately Digg stories into the home page. We have already made some changes over the last few weeks and are going to be making some other changes to the site this week to address a few of the issues we found. Similar to how good security companies try to break their own security, we have always tested and will always run tests to find spam vulnerabilities on Digg.

Most importantly, we should have been forthright with our community about our testing efforts and we'll certainly do so in the future. Rest assured that Digg does not in any way receive financial gain from this activity and the accounts were not used to submit any content.

Events like this are obviously not helping Digg, as it is going through enough internal turmoil already. One of the company's biggest challenges right now is getting its users to trust the service again. The fact that many of its users suspected that the company was gaming its own algorithm to help large publishers shows that Digg still has a long way to go to regain its users trust.

Digg also just announced that it plans to bring the 'bury' feature back to the site in the next few weeks and introduce an image and video filter, as well as breaking news module that will show highlight breaking news stories before they hit the front page.

Recently, I ended a long relationship with Digg.com. And I'm relieved.

For a time, Digg was glorious. For sharing great content, it was the only game in town, and it felt like the future. And whenever outside forces threatened its existence, fears were quickly squashed with reassurances and shows of support from Mr. Kevin Rose. Most of you will remember the infamous Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0. Those days, Digg was shaping the future of the Web.

Rose once said, "We'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company." But a "bigger company" turned out to be the least of its problems.

But for many, there was the promise of reputation, a lot of reputation. Allegedly for some, there was also money in it. That is if certain parties violated the terms of service and decided to take money for pushing sub-par content to the front page. In fact, it got to the point where the entire platform was consumed by this unethical tomfoolery. Everyone knew it was unhealthy, but most ignored it. It was enough to drive a man right to the well-stocked office liquor cabinet.

And then, as the Web evolved and savvy users moved their sharing habits elsewhere, I realized here was my chance to be someone who could sleep at night - because I know what I'm sharing doesn't kill my moral center, or monopolize my online reputation.

There is no such thing as manufactured excellence, and Don Draper doesn't pay to play. So as of today, I will no longer "digg."

I know it's going to be hard. If you're interested in valuable, untainted content sharing, here's a list of services that do it relatively well: Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Hacker News, Email.

As for me, I'll continue to focus on other endevaors, such as building my impressive scotch collection, hanging out in the West Village, and escaping impossible moral dilemas completely unscathed.

I welcome all of you to join me elsewhere online, because I'm certain that all of our best tweets and "likes" are still ahead of us.

Sincerely,

Donald F. Draper
Creative Director, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, Former Digg Enthusiast

Inspired by:

Asked about the departure of Digg's former CEO Jay Adelson, Rose didn't go into details, but noted that "Jay was ready for something new and so were we." For himself, though, the role of Digg's CEO was not something he "wanted to take on." Rose also noted that he wasn't around at Digg much during the months before the departure of Adelson as the service's CEO. He pointed out that he likes to roll features out, but as the backlog of new features at Digg grew and Digg focused more on revenue-producing features than user-facing features, he grew restless. During that time, too, Rose thought that moving engineers to revenue-producing features instead of giving users a new experience was a mistake. Without new features, a lot of Digg's users grew restless and moved on to other services.

"Big and Bold and New"

Talking about the launch of Digg v4, Rose pointed out that the company had to focus on user-focused features again as development of the site had stagnated for too long. To stand apart from Facebook and Twitter - which Rose admits are taking traffic away from Digg - the company had to do something "big and bold and new."

Talking about the mistakes Digg made during the relaunch, Rose admitted that the team made a lot of mistakes. As an example, he noted that the Digg team shouldn't have made the personalized news view the default.

Will Kevin Rose Leave Digg Soon?

Asked about his own future at Digg, Rose wouldn't go into details, but said that he was getting "burned out" and wouldn't say that he would still be at Digg by the end of the year. Rose is clearly very interested in continuing his work as an angel investor - something he seemed far more passionate about than Digg during today's interview - so we wouldn't be surprised if he left Digg at some point in the near future to pursue this.

While Digg has now stabilized the site and added numerous features that its users were asking for, it's hard not to notice that the level of activity on the site has also declined. Currently, it only takes about 200 diggs for a story to appear in the daily top 10 list, and quite a few stories on the front page regularly get fewer than 30 comments.

Reddit Traffic: Only Up 2.6% (Updated)

While there has been a lot of talk about how the service's competitor Reddit would profit from Digg's decline, Hitwise only noticed a relatively small increase in traffic to the site. While there are surely numerous Digg refugees who found shelter on Reddit, overall traffic to the site only went up 2.6% since the launch of the new Digg. (Update 2: I just got an update from Hitwise. Reddit saw 2.6% growth in the U.K. according to Hitwise. For the U.S., Hitwise saw a 15% increase in visits to the site.)

Update 1: Reddit's lead developer Christopher Slowe just contacted us with updated traffic numbers for reddit. According to these numbers - which come directly out of Google Analytics - Hitwise's numbers for Reddit are wrong. Overall, traffic to Reddit increased 24% over the last two months (mostly during the month since the Digg relaunch) and these numbers are holding steady.