Why Digg Won’t Change and Who Moved My (digg) Cheese?

This will be my last post about the new Digg site. I’ve found watching the new site go live and the reactions from both passionate Digg users and the blogs that have reaped the big cash rewards of a busted algorithm fascinating. I think there is one set of topics that hasn’t been discussed and so this post will conclude my coverage.

Why Digg Won’t Change

I struggled with using “won’t” or “shouldn’t” for this section. Apparently this new release marks the fifth time Digg users have gone on the offensive for changes to the social news (?) service. With a new CEO at the helm as of today, Digg could be trying to position the service for growth. I think that Digg is instead trying to change in the hopes of getting fresh acquisition interest. The old model was stale for Digg and many early Digg users have grown up and moved on. Other services like Twitter and Facebook have passed Digg for news sharing supremacy in a short amount of time.

For Digg to start to add more cylinders (or is it batteries?) to their engine, they needed a freshness overhaul. Two years ago I wondered if Digg was looking to be acquired by a media outlet. I think the new version positions Digg as a good acquisition target for a media service like Comcast.

In just a week, all of the major tech blogs are pumping Digg bigtime – something that hasn’t been seen since Twitter launched their first buttons and blogs pushed their Digg buttons to the recycle bin. This renewed publisher interest is exactly what Digg needs again – they need visibility and inbound (non-Google) traffic.

Would Digg feel a big hit if all of the top Digg users left the site permanently? With the new auto-generated RSS feed option that most of the popular blogs are using to feed ALL of their stories (even sponsor thank you messages), the “discovery” model isn’t as important anymore.

What I find interesting is that today the company announced some algorithm changes and it sure looks like we are back to the old “ars and wired” dominated home page. What is shocking is that there have been close to zero non-tech stories to hit the new homepage since the launch. I mean don’t the New York Yankees deserve some frontpage love?

I am not sold that this new Digg will be able to significantly increase their userbase because for a user to be excited about Digg, their friends and sources also need to be using the service. And the average Internet user already talks to their friends and gets their news via a variety of other popular social networking services. I do, however, strongly believe that Digg will increase their traffic from a larger percentage of their current userbase. People who haven’t used Digg in years will stop by after being hammered on a blog which pumps Digg. These users will contribute heavily to the growth of Digg and what I believe will be an eventual sale within the next 18-24 months.

The newly-hired CEO sure does have his work cut out for him! Does Digg move forward and ignore the screaming of their most passionate users? Or does Digg do what a small but most engaged set of users want right now?

Who Moved My Cheese?

Since the new Digg version 4 site went live, I’ve spoken with several top Digg users about the changes. And over the years I’ve spoken to many of Digg’s top users. One thing seems to always come up in nearly all of the discussions…that is the user is getting some sort of benefit for driving traffic to stories. Typically that benefit isn’t direct cash payments as I believe that’s banned by Digg. But many of the top digg users provide “consulting” services which include traffic and link generation.

If these “consultants” are used to going to their one location for quick huge traffic bursts, now that the cheese is gone, is this the reason why so many Digg users are outraged that a few blogs owned the home page? While there have apparently been changes to the algorithm so that one source can’t own the home page, will the cheese ever return for this set of consultants?

Etc

As a side note, I mentioned on Twitter last night that it would be awesome if the blogs that benefited from the busted algorithm donated the extra ad dollars they earned to a worthy tech cause. I doubt anyone will step up- but wanted to throw it out there as a suggestion.