How Digg Got Spanked By Its Own Users
Unhappy with a deal that Digg.com's management cut with major media companies, the social news site's users turned Digg's front page into a de facto advertisement for rival aggregator Reddit today, upvoting scores of Reddit links.
Reddit, as it turns out, is actually owned by a major media company (Condé Nast), but that's not the point. The point is that angry Digg users will knife you hard if you cross them. Right now 10 of the 16 news links on the front of Digg point to Reddit, and two more point to stories covering the Digg rebellion. This is retribution for gripes about the new version 4 of Digg, which allows publishers to submit all their new articles directly to the site, bypassing the form they previously had to fill out manually. A bug in the new system let a link to a short Paris Hilton quote remain on the front page for hours on Saturday, further enraging users.
"When Facebook changes, everyone complains," wrote one Digg commenter, "but the difference is they stay because the BASIC FUCKING function still exists. Maybe not today, next week or this month, but one day Digg will be a ghost town. " Either that or everyone will get really angry for a day, play some juvenile pranks like upvoting porn and Reddit links, and then Digg will change some things and everything will revert to normal on Tuesday.