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by yalogin 1114 days ago
I was really hoping there would be an analysis of why the v4 was needed from a revenue point of view. The v4 essentially winked the company because no one likes the UX/UI. Digg insisted on it. Interestingly years later, Reddit followed the same route. They moved to the exact same UI that I hated with digg. Luckily they kept the older UI which is what kept me with the site. I am yet to get an answer about why the redesign was necessary and what it would give them they couldn’t get with the old design
3 comments
phire 1113 days ago
Digg was more or less dead before the v4 launch. They were already losing a flood of users to reddit and other social media networks (facebook and twitter were going though the roof). They had massive issues with voting rings manipulating their algorithm and selling access to their front page. And when new front page spots weren't bought, they were almost always just posts that had reached the front page of reddit several hours earlier.

This post also mentions an update to google search which hit them hard, and a bunch of internal issues, senior staff leaving. They had a limited runway and the company was going to run out of money unless they did something.

The something they decided to do was "launch digg v4". It wasn't ready from a technical perspective. Worse, it really looks like they skipped the market research step used their once chance to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what worked.

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biorach 1114 days ago
> why the redesign was necessary and what it would give them they couldn’t get with the old design

Revenue. Well, that's what they hoped.

At the expense of user experience.

Enshittification, but without the lock-in, which ended predictably

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tomstockmail 1113 days ago
While the UI was part of it, a big reason people didn't like it was that corporations had their own accounts and were posting directly in the feeds. That's something that integrated into reddit Reddit a number of years ago, first as ads and now also directly in subreddits, and even longer if you count AMAs or obvious astroturfing.

Tangentially related, just yesterday a rideshare company got into hot water for posting support on reddit where they used the persons real name instead of their username.

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