Will they ever fix that damn Axel? Probably not the way it’s looking.

Yesterday Digg.com relaunched into version 4 and it was a massive failure. Publishers and uninformed Digg users flooded Twitter with congratulatory remarks for Kevin Rose and his crew. Those users did not actually try to use the site which constantly crashed,  displayed the “Fail Trail”, as well as crash messages that the crash issue had a probability rating of being a crew members fault.

Digg has sold out, plain and simple. Power users and a huge percentage of the community have voiced disapproval, yet the Digg camp has yet to address their concerns.

I actually received a tweet today from Digg stating Diggv4 is up and now stable, I clicked the link only to be led to a page that stated “Failed to load story”. Yeah I LOL’d.

So today the big social media news and traffic is Digg’s Epically Failed Relaunch, complete with tweets about how people love the new failure screens. At least Digg is finding a way to entertain us through their failure.

But let’s get down to it shall we? Gone is the video section. Gone is the Bury button. Gone is any hope of us really giving a shit about Digg anymore. Publishers now have more traction than the hardcore Digg community. Digg hit a huge number of page views by content found by it’s user base. It was a way for it’s old users to give main stream media the finger and publish news that was relevant or would be overlooked. Once the huge page views started rolling in, Digg basically said “Hey mainstream media, you want a piece of this? Set up an account, plug in your RSS and go!”

This move pretty much destroyed the Power User and the good content that someone could find on Digg. You can’t unfollow a publisher and the “Your News” section section, based on Digg’s recommendation engine, reads like a Google reader on crack.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Digg is going to take a nose dive from this. The good/overlooked content we were used to seeing, will now be replaced by mainstream media’s bullshit.  If ,that is, you can ever get the site to work long enough to view a submission, or even leave a comment.

I never thought I would ever say this but PLEASE BRING JAY ADELSON BACK!

I really used to like Digg, they had made some mistakes in the past but, at least the site was usable and still somewhat enjoyable.

Now the big question; Is Digg going to listen to it’s true community and fix the issues? Probably not. They invested a ton of time and money into the new model and really want it to work. Not to mention they signed a shit load of publishers up for the new launch. They are no longer what they once were. They have become what all it’s users stood against, a big media sellout.

I would love for Digg to prove me wrong and actually hold a Digg dialogue to address this with it’s user base. Prove me wrong Digg, please. Prove me wrong in the sense that you guys do give a shit about your users and NOT the publishers. If you don’t take that step Digg, you lose out. No one is really going to care and the masses will defect to Mixx, Reddit, and other social news sites.

Digg tried way to hard to stay relevant. If they only realized it’s hard core user base was not going to abandon them, they would have had a fighting chance. Now it’s not looking to good for them.

Image Credit “ITTHING.COM”

So where do we go from here? Do we boycott? Do we defect? Do we bitch and moan? My guess is we can complain all we want, but just like any mainstream outlet, they are just not going to care.

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