A New Design, Promotion Stats and more Notifications
Everyone here at Digg is excited to announce our biggest feature release so far in 2011. Today we're beginning a rollout of three features:
- a new design incorporating frequent suggestions from our community,
- everyone's historical number of stories promoted to Top News as well as historical percentage of stories promoted to Top News, and
- optional on-site and email notifications when stories you submit or Digg are promoted to Top News.
Today we're rolling these changes out to approximately 15% of logged in users; we plan to roll out these changes to all users over the course of the next several weeks.
In addition to launching these features, we're launching a new way to launch large features. Viewing the new design won't be a matter of refreshing your screen and seeing a new experience, instead you'll be asked if you'd like to opt-in.
After opting in and exploring the new design, you'll still be able to return to the current design.
We launch new features because we think that our users will appreciate them, but sometimes we miss out on great ideas or launch features which are unnecessarily hard to use. We hope this opt-in period will allow us to collect a tremendous amount of feedback before changing things up.
Depending on the size of the feature, the opt-in period will vary from a couple of days to one or two weeks. After we've reached a level of polish we're proud of, we'll bring everyone along for the ride, leaving the old-design for the history books.
Enough talking about how we roll features out, let's take a deeper look at the features themselves.
New Design
This new design includes a new way to browse between the different sections of the site and an easier way to filter your content. We've simplified the design to make stories more prominent and easier to read. The newly organized profile page makes it a snap to see all your statistics. And last but not least, a new submission flow makes submitting stories easier. We couldn't wait any longer to share these with our users and gather feedback before a public rollout, but there's still a lot of work to be done.
Profile Statistics
Since launching V4, we've been working on importing data from V3 into our new system. It's ended up taking much longer than we expected, and today's push will reveal two important statistics: the number of stories each user has had promoted to Top News, and the percentage of stories they have submitted which have reached Top News.
We also took a look at the top 20 Digg submitters of all time:
| Username | # Promotions | Percentage Promotion | # Submissions |
| mrbabyman | 4567 | 30.27% | 15087 |
| msaleem | 2780 | 34.33% | 8099 |
| mklopez | 1855 | 10.59% | 17509 |
| makimaki | 1826 | 37.43% | 4878 |
| jaybol | 1474 | 28.99% | 5085 |
| louiebaur | 1384 | 44.37% | 3119 |
| badwithcomputer | 1350 | 31.01% | 4354 |
| ltgenpanda | 1189 | 44.97% | 2644 |
| skored | 1171 | 44.32% | 2642 |
| talsiach | 1138 | 35.65% | 3192 |
| burento | 1064 | 32.48% | 3276 |
| digitalgopher | 1040 | 48.26% | 2155 |
| amyvernon | 1039 | 30.34% | 3424 |
| bukowsky | 939 | 30.43% | 3086 |
| badqat | 920 | 49.38% | 1863 |
| openthink | 908 | 48.45% | 1874 |
| cliffosakajapan | 898 | 12.16% | 7384 |
| sirpopper | 869 | 12.56% | 6917 |
| irfanmp | 838 | 51.32% | 1633 |
| hdar3415 | 822 | 15.08% | 5450 |
See any familiar names in there?
Promotion Notifications
The last change we're pushing out today is notifications for when stories reach Top News. The first allows you to be notified when a story you submit is promoted to Top News, and the second notifies you when a story you Dugg is promoted to Top News. Together they should help you understand how your impact shapes the frontpage of Digg.
Like our other notifications, you can opt-in to receiving them either on-site or via email.
As always, please let us know about any feedback or bugs you find! Also, many thanks to everyone at Digg who brought these changes to life: Can, Jamie, Rich, Mike and Tyson.