Digg Users Protest the New Digg by Flooding Homepage with Reddit Links

August 31, 2010 By Ryan Fleming

Angry Digg users have united to push stories from Reddit onto the Digg front page.

Not everyone is happy with the newly redesigned Digg website. Unless, of course, you work at Mashable, but that is another story. In protest to what many see as at best a flaw in the new algorithm that helps select what goes on the front page, and at worst is blatant pandering to particular companies, Digg users have united to flood the site with links from rival website Reddit. The campaign has been so successful that according to the Huffington Post, at one point six of the seven top stories on Digg were from Reddit.

In response to the redesigned Digg, many users are pushing for other users to specifically “digg” articles from the rival Reddit site. One article featured several comments asking users to band together in an act of “sabotage.”

“Digg users fight back, sabatoge front page”, the user bdsams said.

“Actually new digg is great, you know why? Because of it I discovered reddit which, despite what people have been saying on digg, is great!” Adriaaan posted.

“How do you delete your profile? im trying to figure out how to do it.. after 5 years of being a digger. CYA on REDDIT!” shiftgood claimed.

Since the new Digg was launched last Wednesday, Digg’s traffic has seen a massive drop and continues to freefall. According to the Internet tracking group Alexa.com, Digg’s traffic has dropped nearly 33 percent.

Digg CEO Kevin Rose has tweeted regarding the issues, claiming that they are working on it, “Digg update: As mentioned on TWiT yesterday, we’re working hard to fix the source diversity part of the digg algorithm, more news soon.”

If you like this story, please submit it to Reddit, then “digg” it once the protesters get a hold of it.

Showing 4 comments

guest at 11:11am 2nd September 2010 "...according to huffington post..." Hey, why actually be a reporter when you can get away with pretending to be a reporter.
Sam Howard at 7:36pm 31st August 2010 We've welcomed the influx of refugees over at Reddit, and to our surprise, there's been little conflict. If anything, they don't take it for granted the way we do. They're certainly welcome company.
digger2010 at 7:17pm 31st August 2010 i go to digg from time to time to find interesting articles and news that is recommended by most diggers but i'm not a power user. the new digg which is v4 has bad interface, hard navigate, especially the load more button, every time you backspace it will go back to default. the bad thing is the submission from major site and not from a digg user, it defeats digg's original purpose.
@CrowderSoup at 10:31am 31st August 2010 Digg definitely has issues, but I think that the protesters are making them harder to solve and only accentuating the problem. Alexa shows hits to digg being down over the past few days, but over the long term the stats are good. I think the site will recover, the issues will be solved, and all those who deleted their accounts and deserted to reddit will regret it. I did make a nifty little pie chart about why the new digg does suck though. You can find it over at http://bit.ly/bPLlWQ