Digg’s Shout Silenced, But Are Users Worse Off?
When my friends on Digg.com used to find something interesting, they would “shout” it to me. I’d review the stories they sent me, and I would Digg the ones I liked. This was the how we shared our findings on the vast space known as the world wide web.
Figure 1 - Despite this feature disappearing, I will still not join Twitter.
In late May, Digg announced that “shouts” were no longer going to be an accessible feature to notify your friends of articles on the site. Let me take a step back. For those of you not familiar with Digg or social bookmarking in general, I’ll fill you in. Social bookmarking is a method for internet users to store, manage, share, and organize bookmarks of web pages. I’ve written an article on social bookmarking here. More specifically, Digg is a site where users submit images, articles, and videos in different categories, and other users “digg” or “bury” the links. Those with the most “diggs” make it to the front page, where they get more exposure. Community interaction is encouraged in the comments of each link, where comments themselves can be “dugg” or “buried” as well.
Shouts were an easy, localized way to share links with your friends. Now, when someone shares an article with me, I typically get an email saying something to the effect of “Digg is completely retarded and disabled shouts, so I’m sending you this link. Copying and pasting sucks dick.” If shouts were an easy, widely used method of distributing content among Digg users, why were they removed? The Digg blog says:
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