Comments on: Digg stops redirecting some URLs, links to self instead

Digg changes the way its shortening service handles outgoing links, bringing more users to look at its own pages, instead of the sites it's linking too. Users are not happy.

[jaguar717]

Wow. I'm hard pressed to think of something I could care less about.

I guess it's another sign of our entitlement-princess generation that people join a site and confuse giving their feedback with being owed something. Same with every facebook and myspace whinefest.

If you don't like something by all means send an email, and if a site doesn't provide something of value to its users they'll obviously leave. But when you have a small, annoying minority of users who think they're entitled to someone else's product on their terms, something has gone wrong.

You get to dictate changes when you own it and are paying the bills (I know, I know...you're not supposed to be responsible for those any more...)

[make_or_break]

I dunno...after reading through the article it sounds like something I'd care about...IF I bothered to use the service to begin with. Look, Digg offers itself as a service of convenience, until now free of constraints like mandatory membership in order to use its services. Now that it has its devoted users' attention, it changes itself--apparently unannounced--to something quite a bit different. If I were a user I'd be unhappy about it, particularly because this change came out of the blue without any prior warning.

There's no "entitlement" process involved here. But there IS the matter of trust. Linking to their own versions of news, articles and stories stored on their own servers rather than servicing the original links around the web like it used to be does smack of making this change for self-serving interests. While it might be understandable to do so for the sake of the survival of their own business model, to do so without warning makes Digg and its services seem quite a bit less trustworthy.

[Josh.Lowensohn]

@make_or_break, Great points. I'd argue that it's less of a service of convenience as much as it was one of focus for a certain set of users. You wanted to shorten a link and have people Digg it too? It would do that for you. But with this change it's become a little less straightforward as to what users had originally linked to which is where some of the confusion is coming from.

[jaguar717]

Well maybe I'm just not "web-2.0" enough, but phrases like "users cry foul" just make me think waaaaaa. Maybe it's the first two words of that phrase that do it...

Of course they want more page views. And from the (very little) time I've spent on Digg, the users seem to mostly be...enthusiastic Digg'ers, shall we say. Why exactly is being linked to another Digg page so offensive?

[stoolydrumpy]

I think that the best URL shortener is FartURL.com.

[badasscat]

Yes, Digg-shortened links should have always come with the Diggbar on top, but the Diggbar should never have worked the way it did. The Diggbar disaster was in the way it was implemented, not the concept itself. And all Digg would need to do would be to change the way the bar itself works in order to make the solution to this mess completely obvious, and one that hardly anyone would complain about. But they still choose to instead come up with another "solution" that just annoys the hell out of people.

They really could not possibly be more out of touch.

Anyway, does anyone actually use Digg to shorten urls? And this is yet another reason not to. They've basically signed their own death warrant in this space.

bit.ly is the company to watch in the url shortening space, due to the fact that they focus so heavily on analytics - that will be the way they make money. They actually make the people who use their service *want* to come to their site, unlike every other url shortener I know of.

[brokenrobot]

It's like Digg just wants less people to visit the site. I stopped going there once the digg bar was implemented. Reddit is the bees kneess.

[kormiko]

I guess they like digging themselves into a hole. (someone had to say it)
I never dug Digg anyway.

[MattilatheHun]

DigDug on the other hand ruled my world when I was eight.