Since originally launching last April, Digg’s URL shortening service DiggBar has been marred with controversy, though things have mostly died down over the last few months. Now it looks like Digg has made a change to the service that will alight the web’s flames of fury anew, and this time their actions have moved from irritating to downright shady.
The change is a subtle one, but it will have major implications. Typically when you use a link-shortening service, anyone who clicks on your shortened link will be sent directly to the original article that you’ve linked to, without any landing page or barrier in between. This is how nearly every single link shortener works, from Bit.ly to Awe.sm, and up until now DiggBar worked basically the same way, though it inserted a frame at the top of the page.
But sometime in the last few days DiggBar has changed this core functionality: clicking on a DiggBar shortlink will send anyone who isn’t already logged in to Digg to Digg.com’s list of comments about an article rather than the article itself. So, if I linked to TechCrunch.com using the DiggBar, users would first have to go to Digg’s page about TechCrunch.com before they could actually make it over here. In short, this is totally ridiculous.
It’s not hard to guess why Digg would want to make the change — every single non-member to click the link is being sent to Digg.com, which means the site is going to get new users and a big traffic boost. But it totally kills the user experience. As someone sharing a link, I would never want to force them to jump to a landing page before they could see what I was trying to share. It just leads to too much confusion, not to mention the fact that it’s incredibly irritating. And I’m not the only one to feel this way — famous Digg user MrBabyMan is reportedly bashing the change, as are other top Diggers. Digg may have just boosted the amount of traffic it gets from DiggBar, but it may have killed DiggBar itself in the process.
This isn’t the first problem users have had with the DiggBar service. Soon after its launch, there was an uproar over the way it handled its redirects (it used a 200 code rather than a 301), though it soon reached a compromise. Since then the uproar has died down, though most website owners aren’t too happy about the fact that a site linked to using DiggBar effectively hides the original source URL (yes, you can still see it, but not in the address bar where it normally is).
This underlines one of the biggest problems with URL shorteners: you’re basically adding another layer of indirection on the web — something that Delicious founder Joshua Schachter says contributes to making the services downright evil.
There’s still a chance that this was a bug or mistakenly enabled, though our tipster says that Digg has confirmed that it is working as intended. We’ve contacted Digg directly, but they have yet to respond.
Update: The backlash has already begun. Tweetie developer Loren Brichter just tweeted that he would be pulling Digg support from the popular Mac and iPhone client if it doesn’t change things back soon.
Update 2: Digg founder Kevin Rose has tweeted that he didn’t know that the change was going live, as he has been on vacation for the last two weeks. Don’t be surprised if we see this switch back very soon.
Thanks to JD Rucker for the tip.
“In short, this is totally ridiculous.”
Well said.
Yeah it is ridiculous. By the time the visitors click and get redirected where they supposed to be, they’ll be annoyed and completely lose interest in reading the linked article or web page.
I doubt it. It’s going to be obvious that it’s a digg link. Plus, at least you know the initial click will be safe, without needing to add a “preview.” or “#” or anything else.
But sometimes people are in a rush. They don’t really have the time or patience to wait and go through all the re-directions from one link to another.
What browser are you using that demands you wait for a page to fully load before clicking on a link that’s already displayed?
I don’t think its about the browser. I guess he doesn’t want to hop from one link to another to reach his destination web page.
Things in Digg happen without the knowledge of Kevin Rose? Do you believe it? I wonder if all this is one whole drama and Digg is just trying to gain maximum mileage before pulling out this landing page phenomenon. But it spoils Digg’s user service and the Digg Bar, of course.
Techcrunch should reverse the posting order of comments so that the most recent show up at the top. Check out TED.
It’s more fun. It democratizes commenting. Everybody gets a little airtime. The way it is now, on highly commented blogs, the first comments get all the attention and the end comments get no attention. It’s like going to the cafeteria and the first guy gets all the food while the rest just get to watch.
On low commented blogs it’s not relevant. On highly commented blogs it’s clearly a violation of the Commenter Bill of Rights.
facebook already does this and networks are following suit. If digg had done this all along, people would never have minded. If you don’t like it go somewhere else, but look for more aggregators to be doing the same thing in the mad scramble for traffic.
I say, good on digg. Otherwise what a pain it would be to try to get the comments.
http://tinyurl.com/ was surely the first to offer such a service and it’s been around for eons. I’ve never heard of it doing anything except redirect straight to the URL you intended, so why not just use that?
>> I’ve never heard of it doing anything except redirect straight to the URL you intended
Change the URL to http://preview....rl.com/whatever and you will get a preview landing page with TinyURL – they were actually one of the first to implement this sort of feature.
Completely different though, the digg page has to load several hundred KB of javascript and comments that I’m just not interested in.
I made a Digg Url for this article http://digg.com/u190eZ …. it seems to be showing me the article with the Digg Bar at the top and not the Digg Home Page as mentioned in the post ….
Interestingly now it is dong exactly as the post states taking me to http://digg.com...rs_To_Digg_Home
It will go directly to the article if you’re logged into Digg, but for those who are not logged into Digg or who don’t have a Digg account it goes to the comments page.
That’s because you’re currently logged into Digg. If you log out of Digg and try to go to the link again it will go to the digg.com page for the article.
I wasn’t logged in at all(hardly use digg), just added the perpended digg.com/ to the URL and then pasted it again on a new tab(chrome) with the digg Url.
After 3-4 tries …. it finally took me to the comments landing page. (Still not logged into Digg)
It seems to be a little inconsistent. When I was logged in, it took me directly to the article. When I then logged out, it took me directly to the article, but then I tried it (logged out) from a different browser and it took me to the Digg homepage.
I’d bet that’s totally by design. The first couple clicks are usually done by the poster (link creator) to make sure it worked right.
Digg is tricking the user into thinking that the link is going direct, and then changing it after the fact.
Shady is too kind of a word.
I just tested this. Logged out, it took me to the digg page for the story. Logged in, it took me to the techcrunch page, with the diggbar up top (that’s in my preferences settings within digg)
I don’t get the big deal. Where do techcrunch short urls go? to techcrunch right? not to the story that the techcrunch article is about. Those are linked in the article.
Sounds good to me. They might as well try to be different. People will just have to understand that digg links are to “comments” about news, rather than news.
They can change the behavior for new links moving forward, but they’re breaking a handshake agreement with their users who intended for search engines to a follow a 301-redirect to their site. Publishers may lose PageRank to Digg which makes the move unethical.
Good picture. Yeah they just shot themselves in the foot. It may not be as bad in the short run, but in the long run of things; perception and trust has been really broken.
James F.
TwitterBackground.com
shady company
They are discussing this on TWiT with Kevin Rose now. http://live.twit.tv
wow that’s really lame. Not going to ever use Digg’s shortening service.
This isn’t a problem. Digg didn’t start as a link shortening service, but as a social news site. The shortened URLs are simply a convenience to link to Digg’s comments and voting functions. The other shortening services began life with a single responsibility.
Except Digg positioned this as a link shortening service. And they changed the functionality without giving anyone any warning. This was a bad move.
I wonder when bit.ly will do this. I don’t like it all, but it is oh-so-monetizable.
the tempation could be too great.
They’re (still) a startup. Expect them to be figuring things out along the way.
True, they should have warned folks or thought things through initially (and not sold it as a traditional URL shortener for a couple of months), but it’s not the end of the world that they didn’t. There are plenty of other standard shorteners available for people who don’t like this.
I’m fine with the ‘let them experiment’ startup mentality. But not alerting users to the change is sleazy.
There’s irony in this comment somewhere
Sorry that should have read “hypocritical” not ironic
I agree. Up until the URL shortening began, a digg link meant a link to the comments page for something, with the thing–photo, video, news article, whatever–just another click away. This change is restoring what the digg link has always meant, though power users (those with digg accounts) can turn this functionality off if they like.
If people wanted to link to the comments of the article they would do it, they have a perfectly good url to c/p to do that. What BS.
i hate the digg bar.
Stumble guys (Su.pr) did a much better job.
Sounds not bad to me. I always wanted some more info about the site instead of going directly to some page. It shows what’s hot and new at digg about the site.
URL shortening services ARE evil, Josh is absolutely right.
Tim Berners-Lee has been telling us since the day he invented the web… URLs should be as permanent as possible, adding temporary indirection and using services that can change where a URL points to just go against the whole fabric of the web.
helps Google though, because the more scattered and unpredictable the web gets the more we have to rely on search
+1
-1
and the less annotation data Google has to weight the listings
Play Digg off Keyboard Cat…
digg isnt a link shortening service, that is merily one of their features to be twitter friendly.
THEY LINK TO THEIR OWN WEBSITE??? *GASP* reminds me of a certain twitter/iphone/google blog that links to themselves 25 times in a single article
the title is also misleading, the diggbar hasnt changed.
Hate the diggbar. Digg isn’t what it used
to be. They’re a little too big for their britches now, imo.
I think this isn’t that bad of an idea! I think the DiggBar was far better and they should keep it. However, no one is making you use their URL shortner. Bit.ly works fine and it’s Twitter’s default. If you are going to go out of your way to choose another one, then their has to be a reason for you to choose a particualar service.
With this service, you now get to the Digg page and for a good reason. Digg is a social bookmarking service, NOT a URL shortener. They have no business providing a mirror service to Bit.ly. I think it’s a good idea because I will only use it if I wan’t my links to go to the Digg page first.
I get the logic of why they did this, but to not think through the other side of it and realize how pissed people would be was a little shortsighted.
Agreed.
I just started an act.ly twitter petition: http://act.ly/9u
tweet this: petition @digg to stop hijacking twitter links. no bait and switch! http://act.ly/9u retweet to sign #digg #goodbyedigg
I dont like how digg has evolved recently and Im glad I didnt install the new toolbar.
This must be the “ballsy move” Rose was talking about…
TechCrunch has become the Valleywag of the web.
POS!
That doesn’t even make sense. Valleywag is on the web.
+1
++
+++
who’s valleywag?
To be fair, it’s not like there aren’t other url shortening services around. I think Digg have done what’s good for Digg users – who do use the site for the intended purpose.
I do think they’ll lose a lot of non-digg users who might otherwise have used the bar… which might turn out to be a short-sighted move as their user-base starts to thin.
However, in conclusion, surely they are doing what’s best for Digg users, and that is their purpose.
Justin.
This isn’t surprising at all and frankly I have no problem with it. I would have rather had it do this from the beginning but from my perspective the digg URL shortening service isn’t a competitor to bit.ly or tinyurl it is basically just for digg users to exchange links. And as long as they aren’t framing my content I have no problem with it.
agree, who uses digg anyway. plus it’s 8 letters
Yep. That is more than stupid.
It is all over twitter about this stupid change.
Cheers
Marc
Yeah, ridiculous. They’ll cave and restore the original functionality. I betcha.
Raise your hand if you’re surprised this would be abused in a user-hostile way.
Who actually visits digg anymore anyway? Their investors are smacking their balls. They want moar money MOARRR
I’m not clear on the reasons for this but Digg related articles seem to elicit many more replies that reference “balls”.
My only real comment is that Digg’s community filtering technology is far more interesting than a redirection flubb — be it planned or not. The redirection flubb is a distraction from the talents of the team that built their commenting engine.
Drawing a browser to that commenting engine is a flawed decision. Rather, highlighting or licensing this commenting system would be better.
If DISQUS can pull it off, you know Digg could.
They will have to change it back soon or else no one will be using it in the future. Which means it will go to the internets dark abyss of failures. Its all up to Digg! lol
i have to say that’s not a bad move for digg fans, and ONLY for them. I think digg should try to integrate with twitter in a different dimension.
If you ‘re looking for some fresh ideas on link sharing, try visiting http://10things.me/
It appears they’ve killed it in one fell swoop.
What is digg?
I just get the feeling that Digg is on the slip…
Kevin Rose was on vacation for the past 2 weeks and just got the news about 2 hours ago of what happened. He is peed!
i can sell you a pet rock
Uugh? As you probably know by now, you put your foot in your mouth (or should’ve) with your comment.
@silvaldropout Mark N is indeed correct, Kevin Rose just twittered that he had no idea of the change.
you too
From @kevinrose:
just now reading the digg short url discussion, I was not aware this changed and will check in on it tomorrow (was on vacation for 2 weeks)
http://twitter....atus/2729862918
I do hope that he fixes it. I agree, this is absolutely awful.
This sounds hypocritical coming from Techcrunch. I remember when Techcrunch pulled a bait-and-switch last year by linking company url’s in articles to your Crunchbase entry. Of course after massive backlash you changed it back to go to the company’s url.
What’s different with Digg?
I don’t see what the big deal is. I would rather be taken to a page that tells me what the site is about instead of blindly being led into potential malware or NSFW material site. You still need to click on the link which right on top of the page to go see site.
Using obfuscated links just ads one more single point of failure to already unstable system. Stop using those.
Advertise.com stealing 4 billions impressions a month by illegal redirects
I have tried Twoak and Oork. My favorite currently is Twoak. It is pretty good.
I can’t stand the DiggBar. It causes the page load to be drastically slower in my browser (even causing the browser to freeze up a couple of times). Another thing that I don’t like is that in Digg’s RSS feeds, the urls go to the Digg page and comments (even if logged into the system already) and it takes yet another click to get to the psuedo-real destination in the DiggBar frame. I’ve dramatically lessened my activity on Digg as a result of this added feature.
Desperate to get more traffic. Twitter is stealing the thunder.
Very shortsighted move. The benefit of the digg bar was that it served as a handy URL shortener that allowed you to bookmark and share the page at teh same time. But most important of all it redirected without people having to click through digg. For digg to take part of that functionality away for users that are not logged in or do not have a digg account is a major problem and for me a reason to stop using the service.
Right now, I’m seeing the diggbar functioning the same as when it first launched – always framing itself, whether one is logged in to digg or not.
IMHO, the best model was when a logged in digg user got the frame, but otherwise the standard (moved permanently) redirect occurred.
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