Digg used to be a leading social news site until recently. Now, the site has not been doing too well. This has been openly admitted by founder, Kevin Rose, whose own future in the company is now being questioned.
In an interview with TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington, Kevin Rose said that the team at Digg have made some mistakes with the site lately and this has led to a substantial fall in their popularity.
About a month ago, they launched a new version of the Digg user interface, dubbed Digg v4. This new site design has not been appreciated by Digg’s ardent users, largely due to major changes in its functionality. A poll on Mashable found that most users preferred the old site even though the changes were meant to make Digg more social and less of a closed network dominated by a few “power users”.
Since the new version of Digg was launched, a large number of its regular users started submitting stories to flood the Top News page with direct links to their competitor, Reddit. As a result, traffic to Reddit shot up and Digg raffic has suffered.
Digg has had three different Chief Executives during the span of just six months. Some employees have also been laid off due to the problems the company is currently facing.
Under the circumstances, Kevin Rose has admitted to being quite tired and upset with the situation. He even went so far as to mention that he had been in favour of accepting a takeover bid worth about $80 million ($60 million plus earnout) when Digg was at the peak of its popularity, but his board of directors had turned down the offer at the time.
Rose has even refused to confirm whether or not he would continue to be associated with Digg by the end of this year.
