Digg Revolt: Angry Diggers Game the System, Flood Homepage with Reddit Links

If there were any doubts that Digg users really don’t like the new site, or rather, that they really, really hate it, you just have to look at the current Digg homepage to know.

It’s no surprise that users are seriously not happy with the new Digg homepage. Just run a search on Twitter and you’ll get a nice dose of “Digg Displeasure”. Which is why it’s utterly humorous to find that a majority of links on Digg’s homepage link to rival site Reddit (which I personally love, love, love).

It’s fair to say that the message is hardly subtle. Reddit, for better or for worse is a Digg competitor, or at least it was for the old Digg, even if the two sites weren’t exactly the same.

People are also enraged over the new publisher accounts that basically let media organizations take over the Digg homepage – traditionally the home to power diggers, the folks who discover and share interesting stories and links.

Seeing those issues persist and the Reddit attack on its homepage, Digg temporarily prevented both end-users and publishers from submitting new content, except for the auto-submit via RSS feeds feature. But as writing this articles, as many as 8 out of the top 16 stories on the Digg Top News section are from Reddit and one of the others is a sponsored entry. It’s also an apparent statement that the new Digg quite blatantly sucks (at least according to a majority of comments I’ve read on the internet).

Remember the times when a Digg hit could bring your site down? Those days are gone now, at least temporarily, because Digg dropped the ball. The first big mistake was the removal of shouts, later replaced with Facebook sharing. Prior to that, Digg was basically a popularity contest. The more original content you discovered, the more power went to you. Shouting cool sites to followers was key to growing your popularity and it gave popular diggers the power to catapult an unknown site or a buried site to stardom.

The question remains though, will this actually accomplish anything. Digg has been known to listen to its users, or at least the really loud ones, in the past. But it has already promised to bring back some of the features and change others and a complete roll-back is certainly out of the question.

The latest redesign won’t change the fact that sites like Mixx, Reddit and StumbleUpon have taken a lot of steam from Digg, which seems to have lost its direction.

Apparently Digg is yet to make a statement addressing the community’s hate of the new version, though we’re just assuming they’re hoping you’ll like it over time.

UPDATE: Reddit is currently sporting a new logo, the Reddit robot holding a shovel. Get it?