Digg Removes Publisher RSS Feeds

Digg is inching closer and closer to version 3. That would make most people who don’t know digg imagine they’re currently on version 2… but no, they’re regressing from version 4.

Digg’s version 4 alienated a lot of loyal users who, among many other things, bemoaned the ability of huge sites to auto-submit stories by RSS. Sites like, for example, mashable eagerly took the opportunity to add RSS feeds to their profiles. In essence mashable and co were spamming digg’s users with endless submissions of unfiltered shite. Digg misread their users bigtime with this, digg users spend great amounts of time searching for great content to submit – taking pride in finding juicy links and submitting them for peer review.

The further problem with the behemoth sites auto-submitting was that they didn’t interact on digg at all. Even a cursory look at mashable’s profile statistics shows us this:

Submitting 5 stories a day and digging 1 story a day, how very very antisocial of them!

Those Days Are Gone Now…

Well, not yet they’re not, but they will be gone in the next week. As an email from digg’s product management confirmed just over 30 minutes ago:

So in the next week, the feature will be disabled. We wanted to give advance notice of this change and encourage you to start submitting your best content manually to Digg. You can also enable your audience to help submit and spread your content on Digg by placing Digg buttons on each story item on your site. We are confident that removing RSS submissions will help increase exit clicks to your sites, and ultimately help you receive more value from Digg.

It really is reassuring to see digg reacting to their users, albeit somewhat late. Keep up the good work digg, you’re making it the user’s site again slowly but surely.