Popular social bookmarking website
Digg, has announced that it will be putting two of the longest features of the site, being Digg Podcasts and Digg Spy to rest as they have become less used with the growth of the site.
The announcement, made by Digg?s creative director Daniel Burka on the official
Digg blog today says that both features have been outgrown and become less useful with the increased Digg user base. Burka goes on to say, ?Subtraction is an often overlooked type of improvement. The retirement of these two features on the Digg site is an example of this principle in practice. In these two cases, I?m confident that it?s the right course of action for the longer term vision of Digg.?
The Podcasts section, which began as an experiment two years ago, will be merged into the video section. Burka says that at the time the Digg team saw podcasts as new and unique and they felt that a dedicated Podcast section was warranted. As the site grew, Digg Podcasts stagnated as the top programs dominated and left little room for new and upcoming podcasts.
Digg Spy was an earlier feature of Digg, and allowed users to discover new content through a live activity stream. As Digg grew, Burka feels that it was no longer indicative of the breadth of activity taking place on the site.
Burka is however, cautious of conspiracy theorists, he comments, ?One issue I suspect may be brought up is that Digg Spy is one place on the site that surfaces some burying activity. People have tried using Digg Spy to track burying activity and I won?t be surprised if conspiracy theorists accuse us of burying (pun intended) the feature to hide this. In fact, only a very small subset of buries on the site actually appeared on Digg Spy due to the small window of activity that was actually visible through the feature and any ?patterns? that people perceived by watching the buries have always been grossly inaccurate.?