Social Bookmarking giant Digg is in hot water with a large chunk of its user base this week after rolling out Digg v4, the latest version of the website.  To say the changes they made were sweeping would be something of an understatement.  For those who have yet to check it out, Digg not only made considerable changes to the look and feel of the site, but in a more pressing issue for users, they essentially took power out of the hands of readers and put it into the hands of major publishers.  In simple terms, they added tools to allow websites with large amounts of content to automatically publish all their updates to Digg, whereas previously, all content was submitted by users who were encouraged to refrain from posting their own material.  Digg argued this was to compete with sites like Twitter and Facebook, which funnel huge amounts of traffic to sites like Mashable, TechCrunch, and Ars Technica, thanks to easy link publishing and sharing options.   

This and other changes brought about with Digg v4 have cause a huge blowback among Digg's user base (the Diggers, as it were), with Kevin Rose, the company's founder struggling to backpedal fast enough to keep his customers.  Many users have already reported switching to competitors like Reddit.  To actively show their discontent, users also voted up content that was auto submitted from Reddit, effectively taking over Digg's sacred front page with links to one of its biggest competitors, and publicly embarrassing the company.  Digg and its founder have been apologizing and making promises to roll back or fix the changes they made, but the damage to Digg's reputation is done. 

Bearing all that in mind, here are a few things we can learn from Digg's apparent hubris:

Give your users what they want, not what you think they want. 

This should be a no brainer.  It's called market research, and a company with a user base as enormous as Digg's (and one that's based largely on interaction) should have no problem figuring out how to do it.  Diggers are pretty opinionated and never afraid to talk about what they think.  There's no shame in asking for ideas ahead of a release.  They could have even rolled out bits and pieces at a time and got feedback as they went along.  Surveys and polls are not difficult to set up or use.  Certainly less difficult than revamping your whole site twice.

Surprises are great for new products, not changes to existing products.

When your product is a website people visit every day, they tend to grow comfortable with it.  It's like a warm blanket for the user's mind.  It's a refuge from work or a place to blow off steam or find something new and interesting or just to connect.  Change that warm blanket and the kids will start crying.  People are creatures of habit.  We like routine.  iPhone 4 can be something completely new and exciting that nobody saw coming, but if you completely change how iPhone 3Gs work one day out of the blue, people will get very upset.  Simply put: there's a time and a place for sudden change, and it isn't with an existing product people like.

Imitation is the sincerest form of self-induced obsolescence. 

Why did Digg think they needed to compete with Facebook and Twitter?  It isn't even the same kind of service.  As a social bookmarking site, Digg is a hybrid between link sharing and networking.  Rather than post status updates for people to reply to and comment, people post links to content to discuss.  The focus is different.  You might even say it's more of a niche, though it's still a pretty big niche.  Digg has traditionally been a way for smaller sites to get a huge traffic boost for good content (and subsequently crash due to bandwidth limitations) rather than a redundant platform for already large publishers to further push their over saturated content.  Digg's auto publish option effectively turns it into just another place to get the same news.  Why leave Twitter or Facebook to see what's on Digg if the stories are all the same?

Image (larger) via ncomment.
Have your updates tested and ready before you release them. 

Kevin Rose has posted a lengthy list of needed fixes to the new version of the site on his blog.  For a 6 year old website with such a well established community, this is a nightmare.  Releasing a product that immediately needs all kinds of fixes and changes makes you look REALLY unprepared and unprofessional.  In any other company, heads would roll.  Maybe that's why Digg recently switched to a new CEO?  This is what beta releases are for, and that's what should have happened here.

Don't forget your roots. 

By trying to compete with Twitter and Facebook as a publishing medium for major news outlets, Digg has lost touch with the ethos that brought them so much success in the first place.  To its users, Digg has never been a source for already well circulated news stories from big publishers.  Digg was always a place to go for the random oddities and interesting tidbits you couldn't find anywhere else.  Kind of like what The Daily What is now, but with power in the hands of the many instead of the few.  By becoming a glorified aggregator, Digg has nearly rendered their site worthless for the time being.

What's next?

This being the 5th user revolt in the history of Digg, they may pull through thanks to experience alone.  Though I hear most of the coding team is relatively new, management has been through this before.  This may well be Digg's last hurrah as the leader in social bookmarking however.  They forgot that the customer is always right, and now they're getting a rather brutal reminder.  Webmasters, community managers, and web companies would do well to learn from Digg's very public example.

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