Digg’s controversial redesign has apparently led to a mass exodus from the once popular site.
As Robin Goad of Hitwise notes, the Internet can be a fickle creature, but if there is one lesson that seems to consistently ring true it’s this: don’t alienate your core users.
“And it’s a lesson that digg.com is learning the hard way. Having been a paragon of social bookmarking with over 40 million unique visitors a month at its peak, there has been a huge exodus of traffic thanks to an unpopular redesign which irritated a legion of faithful power users,” Goad confirmed.
“Since the end of August, traffic from UK Internet users to digg has declined by 34%. In the US, which is digg’s primary market, visits have dropped by 26%.”
According to Gold, a number of high profile power users have publicly rebelled by switching to an alternative social bookmarking site – reddit.com.
“However, although the decrease in visits to digg is highly noticeable, there hasn’t been a correlating spike in traffic to reddit. ”
Indeed, during the same period of decline in the UK for digg, reddit only increased its visitors by [a relatively paltry] 2.6%.
