Discussion of the cyber rebellion continues to take place in the digg comments section, and over on reddit. You can watch users chat in real time over their woes here.
The mainstream media has picked up on digg’s troubles:
Time Magazine covered a bit of the revolt here in a piece called “Digg Users Lash Out At New Format, Join Forces with Reddit”- though the only new information in the Time piece regards reddit changing their logo to include a shovel, reminding fleeing diggers you can “bury” bad or unwanted stories here! (those lovable, cheeky redditers!)
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The Time piece touches on digg users upvoting reddit stories on purpose; As of right now, 9 of the top stories on the front page are from reddit, and that is not counting the side bar on the right.
these [reddit] stories are being submitted to Digg by Reddit itself through the new auto-submission system that is a core part of Digg v4
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For years now, Digg’s unofficial etiquette stated that users should never submit their own content. The new submission system, however, now encourages publishers to submit their own stories and many are doing so.
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Geekosystem titled their piece “The Rebellion Against Digg v4“, and is winning in their coverage of today’s digg dissatisfaction. Read the whole article, as there are screenshots, pie charts, documented instances of front page deletion of the rebellion, and pictures of satire. Choice bits:
How broken is the new Digg in favor of publishers like the BBC, Engadget, and Mashable? Extremely so, at present. I’ve tallied the 142 front page articles by publisher since Digg v4 went live: 92 of those stories have come from just 13 publishers. It’s even more unbalanced at the very top: Wired has gotten 7 front page stories, the BBC has gotten 8, Engadget has gotten 16, and Mashable has gotten a jaw-dropping 21 front-page articles. In contrast, last year, social media watching firms thought it was abig dealthat 50 different sites controlled 46% of the Digg front page.
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I can understand Facebook not wanting an ‘unlike’ button because they don’t want people to troll your beach photos, but a social news voting site with no way to vote “no” is not really a news voting site at all, bogeyman ‘bury brigades’ aside. The lack of a bury button further tips the equation towards mega-publishers and big advertisers.
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there remains the worrisome possibility that what we have right now is Digg’s endgame: That once a few cosmetic changes have been made, the new Digg will be the rather sterile playground of a few big publishers with aggressive social media strategies, with the very occasional breakthrough article coming from other quarters. Such a site would not be for me, and I suspect it would not be for many Digg v3 users. But there are probably a lot of people out there who don’t bother with RSS readers, for whom a vaguely social site that bathes them in the same vaguely familiar set of articles might be just their cup of tea. As Digg seeks to go mainstream and make some money, towards which v4 is a blatant power play, it seems to have accepted the risk of alienating its user base in favor of this more casual sort of reader. Still, one hopes they aren’t aiming so low. If this is the direction Kevin Rose is headed, he’d best pray that more of his readers don’t discover Reddit — much less Popurls — anytime soon.
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Gawker, in all its wisdom, has written a blurb about today here, “How Digg Got Spanked By its Own Users“. The blurb is very short, but well written and worth reading.
Don’t you feel it would be a better idea to provide constructive criticism rather than being a complete child about the matter?
Mr. Bowman is clearly not a digg user, and knows nothing of the matter – if he was, he would have seen all of the polite requests and constructive feedback offered to Kevin Rose last week. (GTFO trolling-for-hits whore!) Augh.
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and just for the hell of it (it’s pertinent, ok!?):
So today, Monday the August 30th, is “Abandon Digg Day“…. a sentiment repeated throughout the comment section of Digg. As it stands at 4:30 in the morning, on the Monday of Abandon Digg Day, this is what the front page looks like.
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Can you believe a story with 12 votes is on the front page of Digg? I can’t either.
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Notice Mr.Babyman’s plea is the most dugg story, and it has a respectable number of a couple thousand. (Anything on the front page should have at least a couple hundred votes!)
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As you can see from the Kevin Rose = Hitler image above, created by a digg user, they mean business.
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Brandon Davenport wrote a blurb about ‘Abandon Digg Day’ over on T3ch H3lp, and has a screen shot of his own, with even more pitiful numbers (4 diggs on the front page!). Mr. Davenport likes the new digg somehow, hopefully for reasons not related to brain damage. Maybe he is trolling…. being contrary for hits.
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The thumbs up have returned, but this Downfall parody is still pertinent:
Sure, perhaps I am being overtly dramatic here about Digg’s demise, but I personally will no longer use the site in the same way. I oscillated between digg and reddit, but now digg’s user face is too obnoxious and heartbreaking to look at, and the whole mainstream/corporate /algorithm problem is even more broken than it was before….
I used to tell people I met on the street about digg. I would get excited – here was a democratic form of information gathering and media sharing. I would tell them of users submitting stories, with users voting for the stories, and based off the amount of votes that story got, the rest of the site would read it too. Everyone played a part. I trusted the people on digg to filter out worthwhile, intelligent news stories. The digg user base had no corporate alliance, and no interest in twittering or facebooking news items, or the importance of those sharing numbers.
In case you have not heard, China has developed a new version of its already powerful “East Wind” missile, named DF-21D. The DF-21D makes the US military shake in their boots, as it shifts power over the Pacific Ocean to China.
Explained in laymen’s terms, the US navy cannot defend against this missile. This Chinese missile flies en mass into space, re-enters the earth’s atmosphere at enormous speeds on top of US carriers (making it hard for the US to pick up on radar) and then before impact, explodes into even smaller missiles. It is almost like shrapnel in principle (big explosive, with tiny ones inside), except this missile is specifically designed to destroy US carriers.
(notice the above video was created when news of the the DF-21D came out.)
The one and only Fruzsina Eördögh 
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