Digg

In the next week or so, we’ll be closing down the podcasts section and folding it into the video section of Digg. We'll also be retiring the old Digg Spy. Both of these features have become outmoded as Digg has grown and as a result they have a very small number of users (under 1,000) each. Podcasts will be rolled into the videos section – a better home for longer form videos. Digg Spy will be retired as we look to implement more exciting new Digg Labs projects in the future.

Recently I’ve been speaking at several design conferences about the necessity for iterative development. One of the key points I’ve been making is that subtraction is an oft-overlooked type of improvement. The retirement of these two features on the Digg site is an example of this principle in practice.

DIGG PODCASTS

The podcasts section experiment started almost two years ago. At the time, podcasts were relatively new and we saw them as a unique medium – different enough from audio or video to warrant a separate and custom-designed section of the site. That section was developed to differentiate between each ‘episode’ and the parent ‘show’, which could be ranked over a long period of time. Unfortunately, as we all learned, the podcasts section stagnated because the top shows dominated and there was little activity. This shortcoming is one reason that the podcasts section is used by less than a thousand people on a regular basis.

Over the past couple of years, we also saw a rise in the submission of episodic videos in the main sections of Digg under the ‘video’ media type. Television shows, individual podcast episodes, and clips from shows were frequently intermixed in the main Digg river. This type of natural activity, which can compared to the idea of desire paths, is a pretty strong indication that ‘videos’ is a better home for podcast-type material. By eliminating the awkward differentiation of podcasts, we’ll be greatly simplifying Digg from a user standpoint.

DIGG SPY

The original Digg Spy is being retired for different reasons. We built Digg Spy in the very early days of Digg, when the activity level was less frenetic than it is today and we could show a lot of the action through a live activity stream. It was great. You could discover new content and new people in a visual way that AJAX was just then letting us do.

As Digg grew, Digg Spy became less and less representative of the breadth of activity on the site. We began showing ever-smaller percentages of the activity on the site in order to keep the stream from becoming a blur. Thus, Digg Spy became less informative. When we added the Big Spy feature to the Digg Labs, a better and more entertaining version, the value and distinction of the original Spy became even less clear. We therefore elected to remove it as a feature that’s outlived its purpose. Digg Spy is dead, long live Big Spy.

One issue I suspect may be brought up is that Digg Spy is one place on the site that surfaces some burying activity. People have tried using Digg Spy to track burying activity and I won’t be surprised if conspiracy theorists accuse us of burying (pun intended) the feature to hide this. In fact, only a very small subset of buries on the site actually appeared on Digg Spy due to the small window of activity that was actually visible through the feature and any ‘patterns’ that people perceived by watching the buries have always been grossly inaccurate.

SUMMING UP

Occasionally pruning is the prudent thing to do – in these two cases, I’m confident that it’s the right course of action for the longer term vision of Digg. Thanks so much if you’re one of the people who regularly visited the podcasts section or if you enjoyed watching the Digg Spy stream past – we really appreciate your participation.

Cheers, Daniel