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Remember Digg? It was what people used before Reddit up and took over the social aggregator scene.
Somewhat like MySpace to Reddit’s Facebook, Digg was declining anyway after a disastrous 2010 redesign that saw even power users decrying the changes, fleeing (largely to Reddit) and eventually causing the site’s traffic to dip precipitously. Not much has been heard from Digg since the unfortunate makeover, and somewhat like MySpace, the site has become somewhat of a punchline in the space.
But it isn’t like Digg isn’t making an effort to steal back some relevance- the site today announced the introduction of Digg Newsrooms, because there has “never been a better time to separate the news from the noise.” Digg points to a three-step algorithm that will further sort stories for relevance based on topic, giving special weight to power Digg users in pushing a story forward:
– Sourcing: We locate great content for each topic and display in a real-time feed called “Newswire.”
– Signals: Stories are ranked automatically by an algorithm that looks at recency and popularity including Likes on Facebook, Tweets and LinkedIn sharing, to name a few.
– Curation: The news is then filtered by the Diggs and Comments of passionate users who have gained reputation as top influencers in each Newsroom topic.
Notably, the site does still have significant pull- but it remains to be seen change-averse users will readily latch on to the new features or if the downward trend for Digg, at least perception-wise, will continue. Do you still use Digg- and if so, as much as you used to?
