Digg Becomes Reddit For a Day?

I’ve got two more Digg stories to write — actually I only had one for tonight but then I noticed something worth sharing. It’s certainly been an interesting week for the social news aggregator. They traded oxen for wheels and sold some sheep to keep the new Cassandra servers running as they cross the river. We’ve heard from our close sources that several tech blogs have sent Digg a whole gaggle of new oxen but so far we are unable to confirm.

Top Digg user JD Rucker put together a chart showing the last 118 stories to make the front page and which sites grabbed the highest percentages. Check out his blog for the full chart. Some notes:

• Mashable owned the home page with 15% of the stories – and if you change the clock to only Friday, my guess is that the percentage would be closer to 70%. Mashable also wins for “most unlikely story to hit the frontpage” with their “thank you sponsors” post making the Digg frontpage on Friday evening – now that’s a thank you if I ever saw one!
• Leo Laporte grabbed 8% of the total stories – a lot of which go to his Google Buzz feed (I thought he quit Buzz??) – perhaps this promotion is due to Leo holding the 2nd most popular spot for default users

My suggestion to Digg is simple – if the algorithm that promotes stories is broken, turn off the front page until you get it fixed. While it looks like today’s tech blog to promote is RWW (yesterday was TC), it just looks bad on Digg to not have some sort of variety — and I’m not even talking about tech blog variety – I am talking about overall variety.

The benefit to turning off the frontpage while making the corrections is that you will force users to “learn” how to use the new MyNews function – a function which blogger Robert Scoble says is his favorite part of the new Digg.

On the Leo Laporte show last night, interim CEO Kevin Rose noted that it will be another week before all of the technical issues with the new site are fixed.

Maybe what will get them to move on fixing the home page quickly is that nearly all of the popular stories currently on the home page are links to Reddit (and Reddit links out to the actual stories). It appears that Reddit created a Digg account and is using the auto-publishing function to push all of the stories that make the Reddit frontpage to Digg. My guess is that this will be fixed as soon as San Francisco workers make it to the office (the time is currently pre-8am PST).

You can see a screenshot of the home page below. Oddly, Gabe Rivera’s tech aggregator TechMeme made the frontpage, something I haven’t seen before as typically you vote for the actual content and not the aggregator.