New Digg is coming, August 1 is the launch date
We have been blown away by the response to the survey we put out on Friday. As of today, 3,754 people have responded.
First and foremost, we learned that no one is happy with the current state of Digg. 92% of survey respondents said that they would not recommend the current Digg to a friend.
This level of dissatisfaction does not call for incremental improvements. It does not call for an evolution of Digg. The problem we are trying to solve with v1 — how can we deliver the best of what the Internet is talking about right now? — calls for something else. V1 shouldn’t be a better Digg, it shouldn’t be a better Reddit, and it shouldn’t be a better Hacker News. It has to be different.
Betaworks has already started working on rebuilding the news-sharing social network Digg.com, the site has a neat countdown, and quite a bit detail about the new team working on it right now.
Here is what Betaworks’ team has to save about the new Digg on ReThinkDigg.com :
As betaworks and Digg both announced on their blogs, we are taking over Digg and turning it back into a startup. What they didn’t mention is that we’re rebuilding it from scratch. In six weeks.
On August 1, after an adrenaline and caffeine-fueled six weeks, we’re rolling out a new v1. With this launch, we’re taking the first step towards (re)making Digg the best place to find, read and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet — and we want your help.
As promising as it looks, it would need a lot more than just a new UI to make Digg work. Social News Sharing network has always been a tough thing to build and keep users on it. Digg was simple but lacked the needed development, other sites like Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, etc quickly developed and pulled most of the Digg’s traffic.
