Today, I deleted my digg.com account. So, no more snarky comments from djstrat, unless someone else signs up under that name. If they do, I don’t care.
Why did I pull the plug on my account?
I have my reasons, but mainly to make a statement, just like tech superstar (one of my idols, just like Kevin Rose – even if I occasionally refer to both of them as douches) Leo Laporte did when he abandoned facebook, only to rejoin a few months later. I probably see myself doing the same thing. I found digg to be a cool website that brought me daily news links. Recently, they changed the user interface or “UI” as we geeks like to call it. But, they did a lot more than just that. I’m going to get into all of the techy details (about Casandra[the database, not a woman], mysql and all that), but one major issue was they got rid of the “bury” feature which was part of the pun for digg.com, you were “digging” stories or links, and you could also “bury” them. Now, you can just “hide” the ones you don’t want to see, only for them to pop back up again next time you login. For me, the whole entire site just isn’t what it used to be.
Another major reason I am no longer using digg.com is the lack of user submitted content that I liked. Currently, it seemed to be more of a corporate news fed stream of the same crap I saw everywhere else. I didn’t need that.
I used to enjoy watching diggnation, a video/podcast of digg founder Kevin Rose and his actor friend, Alex Albrecht discussed the weekly top stories on digg.com. I still might watch diggnation but it’s just not the same.
I may waffle and go back and sign up again but for now, my account is deleted. That’s another issue, I had to actually google how to delete my account. There was no setting in the account preferences to do so myself. I found that I had to e-mail support@digg.com with a specific subject in order to get rid of my account.
I understand that it’s a business and things change, but so do people, so for now digg.com will not be part of my life. However, I don’t feel like there is a giant hole that can’t be filled, because I began using digg.com’s competing website. I know Kevin Rose doesn’t even consider it to be competition, because he’s buddies with the Reddit guys but, it is very much a competing website. I’m also not suggesting that other people do the same thing. I just wanted to share my opinion about why I will no longer be using digg.com anymore.