Digg founder Kevin Rose cheerfully responds to the mountains of criticism around the newly launched Digg 4. His overall theme is that users need to deal with it.
Rose says that he’s “gotta take risk” with the service in his quest to push it beyond the 30 million or so monthly visitors to the masses. He wants 20,000 – 30,000 diggs on the top stories v. the few hundred diggs that most top stories get today. To do that Digg is pushing stories that it thinks are more relevant to you, because people and entities you follow have pushed those stories, too. It’s a lot like Twitter, most say, and the soul of Digg is gone.
Rose also says he’s fine with people leaving. “If Reddit is your new home and it’s something you really enjoy I’m all for that,” he says.
He also talks about scaling issues, pointing out that Digg has at least 500 servers in its various data centers. All engineers are focused on making the site stable, he says, and they have no time to rebuild old popular features like upcoming stories. After that, though, he says upcoming stories is coming back soon.
We’ve embedded the show above, you can watch it on Revision3 here.