Modern Primate

The New Digg v1 went live yesterday afternoon after six weeks of development. The new, stripped-down interface looks nice and simple. On first glance, the general layout is not unlike Paper.li.

As mentioned in the rethinkdigg preview post, there are three main content viewing categories: Top Stories, Popular, and Upcoming. What I didn’t expect was the way all three categories are present on the same page. Click on each simply scrolls the page down to the middle for Popular, and near the bottom for Upcoming.

Currently, I only count 16 Top Stories, 7 Popular Stories, and 18 Upcoming stories with no option to explore these categories any deeper. What’s on the front page is all you get.

Most disappointingly is the inability to see where your own submissions go. I submitted three stories and was greeted with a message confirming that the submission was successful before being returned to the front page. After clicking on “Upcoming” the new posts were nowhere to be found.

Likely it’s too soon to judge.

The integration of Tweets related to the stories in Top Stories view is a nice touch, and the composite scoring is a welcome addition as well.

Also as promised in the blog preview, there is currently no commenting. Although a Facebook profile is currently required in order to sign up, there isn’t even Facebook commenting integrated yet. Personally, I’m fine with the lack of comments, although as it currently stands there’s little to keep me on the site for long.

The main feature I’d like to see is a deeper Upcoming view – one that allows the submitter to see where their link has gone rather than being left to feel like it’s been dropped into the abyss. Again, it’s likely that it’s too soon to judge. If it sounds like I’m being incredibly forgiving for the lack of enticing features it’s because I am. That probably speaks more about my desire for an alternative to the current content aggregators we have to choose from than it says about the merits of the new Digg. Maybe the rebirth of Digg won’t amount to much. In that case, I only hope that something brand new and revolutionary can come out of left field and shake things up for the rest of the giants.