Digg's new design scraps comments
This is a huge change in strategy for Digg. No comments? The community was what propelled Digg to popularity in the first place.
Ironically, too, Digg was down for a brief period of time as the rest of the web (Hacker News, etc.) pounded its servers. What a far cry from the Digg effect of bygone years, when webmasters actively prepared for a flood of Digg users.
Such rapid development has meant that some features had to be left by the wayside. Specifically, commenting isn’t here at all — a concession that means this is more news portal than user community at the moment. Whether and how a commenting system would look on the redesigned Digg remains to be seen, but Betaworks says that it plans on conducting “a few experiments in commenting that will inform more permanent features.” Notably, you have to log in with Facebook in order to Digg stories, a feature Betaworks says is a defense against spam, but not necessarily a permanent feature of the site.