Shameful Human(s) of the Week: Kevin Rose and the entire Digg community
Digg is some kind of social media/link sharing mega site founded by TechTV’s Kevin Rose. On August 25, 2010, version four of Digg.com went live. The redesign brought about a wide range of changes both great and small, from a layout cleansing (that looks infinitely better in my opinion), to a refocus on following the activities of your friends and favourite websites rather than the hive mind of the collected Digg community.
The transition has been shaky from a technical standpoint, with Rose and co. re-launching Digg seemingly without adequate preparation. Despite a lengthy testing period, the new Digg has been up, down, and glitchy ever since it went live. The extra click required to hop from your personal stream to the site-wide most popular submissions is also somewhat annoying. Speaking of personal streams, and as a means of being completely self serving, I want to recommend you follow Shufflingdead on Digg.
But this post isn’t just about Kevin. It’s also about the legion of basement dwellers who rely on his site for distraction while their youths slip away. You see, Diggers, like all geeks, are a ravenous bunch of haters. Change of any kind is to be reviled. Digg’s revamp has garnered nothing less than a torrent of whining from its millions of users. A quick scan from this comment page garnered these gems (after the jump):
What the fuck did you do Kevin Rose. Fix this shit.
-swellin
Fix the whole fucking thing! Give us the option to view it the old way. I don’t even want to come on this site anymore.
-mywhitenoise
No bury button. Digg has become facebook. What’s with this social media shit – I already have a facebook account simply because I’m forced to if I don’t want to make new accounts everywhere. Now the view sucks, I can’t easily bury a shitty story like this one, and it keeps trying to integrate with this social shit.
I’m antisocial and asocial. Yes, I actively want the downfall of society. Yes, I dislike everyone. Even those who agree with me. I’m your usual Digg user. We don’t like this shit. Put it back.
-Michichael
[...] Last week, I declared Kevin Rose, the founder of social media/link sharing site Digg.com and the entire community of that site to be Shameful Humans. I blamed Kevin and his staff for prematurely pushing out v4 while it was still packed with glitches and absent in obvious features, and I blamed the community of Digg for completely overreacting to the changes brought about. [...]