Ok, here’s what went down straight from a former digger. Digg has done a lot of shit in the past that hasn’t jived well with the users but the biggest gripe that users had for the longest while were the presence of power users. Power users were users who submitted huge amounts of content to the site and thus their submissions were more likely to get to the front page. Also, articles that they dugg would also be more likely to get to the front page. This was a problem as power users would just digg content from other power users and often steal original content and resubmit as their own. All this made it almost impossible for the average user to get any content to the front page. There were also claims that power users were “selling” their diggs, basically accepting payment from a website in order to push their content to the front page.

The breaking point finally came when “New Digg” was rolled out. Everyone’s comment and submission history was wiped out. A whole slew of sloppy social networking tools were implemented and instead of being able to browse newly submitted content, all your news feeds would be aggregated by whatever your “friends” were digging (though it seems they have brought back the new content feed). It was clunky and stupid and further reinforced the network that power users utilized to push their content to the front page. On top of that, Digg allowed outside websites like gawker.com and techblog.com to become their own power user on the site and push their own content to the front page. It all seemed like it had become just one giant advertising scheme and that website “created by users for users” was no more and so I and many like me jumped ship and washed up here.