So they lost the ability to comment and moved further away from the reddit/HN tight text view (which they used to look like and have been steadily moving away from) and now look like a messy news page.
Is anyone else finding this new redesign even more irrelevant than ever? What does digg provide at all now? No discussion and a very messy hard way to even find anything.
I love the new design, and I love the new content. There were at least three articles there that caught my attention right away, that I stopped to read before even returning to this thread.
Content-wise, it's not the same ol' garbage that keeps getting regurgitated on Reddit, or the same ol' subjects that keep getting rehashed to death on "Hacker"News. ("PHP is a terrible language!" "No it's not!" "Yes it is!" ... yuk.)
Visually, it's not a list of links which can only draw your attention by gaming the headlines. It's about time someone re-remembered that a picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words.
As far as comments go, it's been a long time since I've been consistently enriched by reading the comments on anything anywhere. (This thread is a good example, my blathering included.) I've got my fingers crossed for Web 3.5: "Here's a nice page, shut up and enjoy your stay."
I had the same reaction: yay fresh content! Although, it's a quite a but early to say whether or not the content mix will become stale.
My biggest complaint is the layout that seems to assume a huge screen or something wider than my laptop has. Scrolling left-right in addition to top-down is annoying enough for me to bounce.
Hmm. On my setup, at least, the content container is 1045px wide ... not too wide, I would think. However! It looks like if you're zoomed in, you'll get the same font-size set to a wider page width, which isn't optimal. Is it possible you're zoomed in a bit?
The whole "mason" best fit I suppose. In comparison to say reddit and HN, no real linear flow of headlines. Your eyes tend to dart all over the place with this design looking for information. The F pattern seems to be proven as the best layout for information absorption http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
Those inline tweets are grating. The overuse of lines to delineate related content looks visually noisy. I also think the top story is given way too much space. On my 1280 x 800 display, the new Digg shows me 2.5 stories. I'd like for them to use a tighter grid so they could fit 4-5 stories above the fold on lower resolution displays.
Yes! What's not to like about it, I find the content engaging, the photos (a la Zite) interesting and the site layout looks and works well. I don't see why all these naysayers are complaining about the masonry layout. Magazines looked that way for several reasons, one of them is people seem to like the format. I'm all for sites rethinking the classic list design as we sees here in hn, it's informationaly dense (hacker news) but that only works when the domain is very specific. For Digg, the magazine look works much better. Well done Digg for having some design flair.
I think they needed to take away the ability to comment.
Digg was a pretty awesome community in 2005 and 2006. The content was largely tech related and the comments were informative and interesting.
In 2007 it started getting worse, there were more jokes and memes and the content started to suffer. With no subreddit like system the original community began to become drowned out.
Towards the end of 2008 there was nothing left except memes and lame one line jokes that put youtube comments to shame. I was always surprised by all the people complaining about Digg v4 - the community sucked a long time before that.
I'm impressed by this revision, should be interesting to see what happens.
To add to that, one more issue that caused me to drift away from Digg was the numerous posts/comments on sensitive topics such as religion, politics etc.
Let's say I were to redesign Ebay as a big picture listing site (ability to bid and buy, coming later)
Would anyone consider this a ready to launch replacement? If they don't value commenting as one the of the most core features what hope do they really have?
To me HN is more valuable for the comments then the aggregation. I often skip the article and just look at the comments. Digg cannot now compete with this and if this is their priorities: big gaudy pictures, voting, and distant third or less, commenting... well.
good luck I guess but we have different priorities on what we were hoping for and expecting and need.
I think that "launch" is a relative term here. I mean that in the sense that Betaworks have been entirely open about the process from the start, and are aware that 90% of their audience right now is curious techies like ourselves. I very much doubt that they'll be promoting it much.
This is an alpha, or a beta, or whatever you want to call it.
Reading the comments on the blog, I can completely understand why commenting wasn't the first thing to be implimented. They probably wouldn't put it this way, but I think they needed time for some of the less desirable user base to flee the site in order to start up again and be respected. I remember what happened after v4 was launched, and you couldn't read the comment section of any story without it being about the redesign. If you have a bunch of people complaining about a redesign instead of focusing on the content first, no one's going to even consider coming back, let alone joining for the first time.
It's no secret that the community needs a reboot, and content-first development might work for a site that through any other implementation might just strike people as a poor version of Reddit (regardless of whether or not that may be true).
Is anyone else finding this new redesign even more irrelevant than ever? What does digg provide at all now? No discussion and a very messy hard way to even find anything.