Digg Will Unban All Domains And Drop the Toolbar

Digg used to be the king of social bookmarking sites some years ago. The system was really democratic, and any website, albeit small or new, had a chance of making it to the front page. Sure, there were many people trying to game the system, but the mass of users made a good job filtering what was good content and what was not.

Then the strange things started to happen. First of all some domain names started getting banned. What is worse, the ban was not clearly outlined or official, but it was a “behind the scenes” thing. Almost like a censorship. There were plenty of stories around the web about Digg submissions vanishing, getting magically buried and so on.

After some time people also started suspecting that Digg went on to use editors who would manually decide what stories were allowed to hit the front page, and what stories were not.

The result? The front page started to feature mostly stories from mainstream websites (e.g., NY Times, PC World and so on). As a result many users got upset and stopped using the service.

In a attempt to revamp the numbers (after all they have investors aboard…) Digg launched the infamous “Digg Toolbar” last year. With the toolbar in place, users would never leave Digg to visit the websites featured on the front page. Instead the toolbar would open, displaying the content of the website inside a frame. Needless to say that webmasters had a very negative reaction to this new feature.

Had things kept unchanged, I am pretty sure Digg would start declining soon enough. Luckily for everyone, things did change. Last week Digg announced that Jay Adelson, the CEO for the past four years or so, is stepping down. Kevin Rose, the founder and visionary behind Digg, will get in control again.

I believe this change might get Digg back on the right track.

In fact there are some good news around already. Over at Search Engine Land I discovered that Digg is planning to shut down the toolbar, and to unban all the domains that were censored in the past.

Personally I had already given up on Digg, but these changes will make me try the website/community again to see if its worth my time. What about you guys, are you still an active Digg user? Will you try the site again given these changes?

source: dailyblogtips

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