Well, Digg went down for a short time today to make some changes to their website. When they came back up there was no new post on the Digg blog. I took a quick look around the site and these are the changes I found:
1) The information under a story, as to where it comes from and who submitted it, has been reorganzied.
2) The user profile pages have had overall rankings removed. You can still see how many stories a member has submitted, how many made the front page and the members popularity percentage.
3) When you check who dugg a story, following each members name would be the number of homepage stories they have in parenthesis, this is now gone.
So, what does all this mean? It looks like Digg is serious about killing off any impression of some Diggers being "more equal" than others. Will they follow this up with an algorithm change? that is the key part, just because I can't easily tell if someone is a high ranking digger does not mean they do not still have the power associated with being a high ranking digger. If this move is meant to level the playing field than the Digg algorithm will have to be adjusted to give everyone equal weight behind their diggs. By removing the 'popularity' number after a user's name they make it more dificult to figure out who a top digger is and who is not.
Those are the only 'obvious' changes and until the Digg crew posts in their blog we will not know the full implications of what they have decided to change.
UPDATE
Some users are experiencing a problem logging into Digg, myself included. Digg support is working on this but here is what happens:
1) You log into Digg
2) Digg does not accept your login but, some areas work as if you were logged in:
a) The green "a friend dugg this" stripe appears on stories
b) Clicking on a story will open it in a new window if your options are set that way. Default (not logged in) method is to open in the same window.
c) Clicking on "who dugg or blogged this" results in your "my friends" tab showing up and working as if you were logged in.
The only way to login is to go to the Digg login page (not top of screen) and request a password change. Once you get the password change email you can change your password and you will stay logged in for about 5 minutes. After the system logs you out (half log out as above) you must repeat.
UPDATE 2
I am working with Digg support on this problem. If you are having the same problem please contact Digg Support and they will help you out.
