5 Reasons Why the New Digg Sucks

Digg is a very popular social news website, with millions of followers, and more set to join in the future. To enhance user experience, and to make the website more popular, the guys at Digg released a new version of Digg, the version 4 (v4). While the new version was supposed to improve Digg, it has had an opposite effect. People are complaining, and almost everyone unanimously thinks that the new Digg sucks.

Here are 5 Reasons why everyone thinks that the new Digg sucks:

No Carry Forward

If you haven’t logged on to the new Digg yet, then you should soon. As soon as you log on, you will be prompted to follow a fixed number of Digg topics like Business, Sports, Entertainment and many more. After that, you will notice that you can’t find the friends you had on the old Digg. This is a complete disaster, and you have to search for and add them all over again. To make it easy to add all your friends, you have the option of connecting your Digg account to your Facebook, Google account and Twitter, and this option is only open the first time you log in. It vanishes later, and you will have to wait for a while with the others and see if the guys at Digg will introduce this capability in the future. Also, very sadly, you cannot connect with any new Digg friends, only to old ones.

Wiped out

All the Diggs that you had before, every single one of them, is wiped out on the new version. All comments that you have made in the past, or received, are gone! There is a distinct lack of user driven content, and the nice “community feel” that Digg used to foster has been wiped out as well.

Huge Changes to Interface

Another change that you will notice is that you have to “follow” people. Twitter, anyone? The color is not what anyone will call very bright, and if you don’t fall asleep, then you’ll find that you cannot comment as there is no comments section! This is a big disappointment. Navigating the website, which was so easy before, is now a nightmare and very complicated.

Stories Sections vanished

The very popular upcoming stories section has vanished. The Top News section, another very popular section, does not display news that anyone would term “top” anymore. In all, combining all the changes, it is a wonder that Digg still terms itself as a “news website”.

Sold Out?

The impression that most users have is that the Digg owner, Kevin Rose, has sold out. The content that was user driven before is now akin to a promotion campaign for publishers. There is a limit on the number of stories you can read, and most of the stories are from Reddit. The My News section is stale at best, as it is possible to find stories that are days old.  In the future, you may have to even shell out money to be able to read more Diggs, which is unimaginable.

Truly, a great website has been brought down to its knees. The new Digg sucks!