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Digg has overhauled its site in an attempt to bring users back and regain some momentum.

This rollout incorporates three major changes for the site. The first is a redesign based on user feedback. It places the key Digg topics — Gaming, Technology, Science, etc. — at the top of the page rather than on the side. Story pages have been cleaned up, and the “submit” box has been given more prominence. It now sits at the top of every page, while search has been reduced to a magnifying glass icon that will display the search box when you click it.

The second part of the update focuses on profile pages and the return of profile statistics. At the top right of every profile page are the Digg, commenting, submission and following stats for every user. Digg says it took “much longer” than expected to import the Digg data from V3 to the current version. It’s definitely incomplete, though — my stats say I’ve made zero submissions and zero comments in my many years on Digg, both of which are definitely not true. Some data is still missing.

Finally, Digg has added a new slew of opt-in notifications for when your stories hit “Top News.” While “Top News” has lost much of its prominence since “My News” was made the default, it’s still a point of achievement to have a story you submit reach the front page, so it makes sense that many people would want to be notified when that happens. These notifications will appear either by e-mail or on-site.

The changes are designed to counteract Digg’s painful decline by adding the most-requested user features. Users famously revolted after the New Digg launched last August. Since then, Digg has been in decline, enough to force Digg to lay off more than one-third of its team.

The new features will be rolled out over the next few weeks and will be offered at an opt-in basis. Overall, they’re nice updates, but the company still has a long way to go to regain user trust and woo users back to its platform. Every little bit counts, though, when you’re trying to turn things around.

Check out the before and after screenshots, and let us know what you think of the redesign.

Above: Screenshot of the New Digg

Above: Screenshot of the Old Digg

More About: digg, digg 4.0, kevin rose, New Digg, redesign

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A massive conspiracy to censor left-leaning political stories on Digg has been uncovered, in which tens of thousands of stories were "buried" by a right-wing group calling itself the "Digg Patriots." Did you require any more proof that Digg needs to roll out the new version of Digg ASAP?The alleged conspiracy (we have yet to confirm) was revealed by Alternet's Ole Ole Olson, and it's a doozy of a story. Olson went undercover and infiltrated the Digg Patriots in order to learn about their plan to censor stories that weren't flattering to the right while promoting stories hammering the left.DiggDigg is one of the world's most popular websites and a kingpin of social news, even if its traffic has been on the decline for the last year. Users vote on stories via the "Digg" or "Bury" buttons. Enough Diggs can send a story to the front page, garnering a massive wave of traffic for that story. Buried stories never see the light of day though, and that's what the Digg Patriots were counting on.The conservative-leaning group utilized a Yahoo Group and a service called coRanks to tell its nearly 100 members to Digg or Bury certain stories multiple times per day. It was founded in May of last year, meaning that this group has been operating for more than a year. The accused ringleader is Bettverboten, a still-active Digg power user with more than 1,500 submissions and 73,000 Diggs.The result seems to be the removal of thousands of stories from the annals of Digg. According to Olsen, "this censorship is not restricted to political articles either. Articles about education, homophobia, racism, science, the environment, economics, wealth disparity, world events, the media, green energy, and anything even slightly critical of the GOP/Tea Party/FoxNews/corporations are targets." They also targeted specific users they deemed left-leaning.We have to admit, the Digg Patriots knew what the hell they were doing.

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A Black Eye That Will Soon Be Fixed

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The revelation of the Digg Patriots censorship conspiracy is a major black eye for the social media giant Kevin Rose built. It undermines the fundamental credibility of Digg itself. If 100 users can single-handedly tilt one of the world's top websites to the right by controlling thousands of stories, how can you really rely on Digg as a valid source for the web's top news stories? For what it's worth, Kevin Rose tweeted that the company is "looking into this," as it should be.There's not much the team can do about what's already happened, though; those stories are forever buried. Banning the users involved in the Digg Patriots helps, but it doesn't solve the fundamental issue: that Digg is easily gamed.However, the fix for that problem is almost here: Digg v4, a.k.a. the New Digg. Its launch is impending, and it couldn't come any sooner. The revamped version of the social news website includes two big changes that should mute much of the gaming that goes on in the current version: the elimination of the "Bury" button and an emphasis on personalization that neuters the impact of hitting the front page.Because of the impending changes, Digg will get past this episode without too much damage. It really needs to the clean the slate if it's to make a recovery. Traffic is still going in the wrong direction.

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Ever since the new version of Digg was announced three months ago, it has undergone a lot of revisions and caused a lot of turmoil. In that time, Kevin Rose replaced Jay Adelson as CEO, reportedly unhappy with the direction Adelson was taking the company and the product.The New Digg is almost here though, and we have access to the preview. We've been playing around with the new interface and its many features, and we've compared them against both the "old" DiggDigg and other platforms such as TwitterTwitter and FacebookFacebook.Here are our first impressions of the New Digg:

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Digg Has a Suggested Users List

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When you first log onto the New Digg (New.Digg.com), you're presented with a couple screens. The first one is Digg's version of the suggested users list -- a hand-picked list of people and companies to follow on Digg. The list includes everyone from Kevin Rose to The New York Times to MashableMashable, and it categorizes their accounts based on topic area.Twitter spurred a lot of growth and created a small set of power accounts with its suggested user list (SUL) -- at least until this year's changes. Still, these types of lists help new users get started, and acquiring fresh users is something Digg needs to do.Even if this hand-picked version of the SUL isn't sustainable, it should give the company a boost in terms of new user engagement and retention.

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Adding Content Is Much Easier

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One of the first things that struck us when we finally got to the new Digg homepage was the prominence of the "Digg It" option. It looks and feels like the Facebook Publisher box. Whenever you enter in a link, it imports the title, finds images from the link, and lets gives you write a description and choose a topic. After that, all you have to do is click "Digg It," and the link is broadcast to the Digg universe.There are some other nice features about the new publishing box. For example, if you put in a link for a story that's already been submitted, it will alert you to the fact and display the Digg information for that specific link, complete with sharing tools and a Digg button. It's also a ubiquitous box: you will find it on many of the other pages in the New Digg.Clearly, Digg is placing an emphasis on getting people to add more content and articles to the social news hub. As we've reported before, there is an option in the New Digg to link your RSS feed to your Digg account and auto-submit your posts for the community's consideration.

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Discovering Content

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Content discovery has changed in the new version of Digg. There are two tabs on the top left of the interface: My News and Top News My News is the default homepage for all users. Unlike the current version of Digg, where content bubbles up from the overall community, the new version focuses on content coming from your friends and followers.The new homepage no longer shows who submitted a story, but instead focuses on which of your friends dugg it. Even the sidebar focuses on how many of the people you follow have dugg a story, rather than whether or not a friend of your submitted it.We welcome the change. It democratizes the site a bit more by reducing the need for publisher to hit the front page of Digg in order to generate any traffic. We saw content with between 16 and 150 Diggs on our personalized feed of news.However, long-time Digg users don't have to worry. "Top News" is just like the current version of Digg, focusing on the top content from the collective Digg community. You can even sort top content by day, week, or month. There seems to be a minimum Digg count to appear on the week or month Top News charts though, as we only saw three news items between the two tabs.

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Interface

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The overhaul not only focused on the algorithms and content discovery, but also on the interface itself. It's definitely faster, cleaner, and more social. In our tests, we found it incredibly simple to navigate and a pleasure on the eyes. Unlike the last version of Digg, this is something that new users can quickly pick up and understand.It's not perfect, though. Search still needs some work. For example, we found the exact same content from Mashable when we tried to resort by "Most Recent" or "Best Match." Hopefully this is a small bug that will quickly be resolved.Overall though, the New Digg is a remarkable improvement over its predecessor. It keeps much of the old look and feel of Digg, while giving it a much-needed refresh and emphasis on the social graph. Expect the new version to launch for all users very soon.

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Ever since Digg revealed the completely overhauled version of its website at South by Southwest (SXSW), there has been a lot of anticipation surrounding the completely overhauled interface. Now we’re one step closer to the launch, as Digg has just released redesigned Digg buttons and a new version of the widget generator.

If you’re a regular reader of MashableMashable, you’ve seen the new buttons by now; we implemented them not long before Digg’sDigg big announcement at SXSW. The buttons feature a thumbs-up, rather than the “Digg it” of the past. The thumbs-up is a more universal symbol, which makes it ideal for the new Digg: Anonymous users will be able to digg stories once the new version rolls out.

The other new change is the updated Digg widget generator. It’s slicker, faster, provides more links to the publisher’s content, and can be customized with tabs and columns. I’ve embedded a quick version of the widget specific to Mashable to give you an idea of what the new widgets look like (Note: For some, the widget reverts to an old style; we think this may be a bug that has yet to be fixed):

See more Mashable.com stories on Digg.com

Digg has a lot to do in advance of the launch of the new version, but the release of the buttons marks an important step in that process. With faster and more user-friendly Digg buttons in place, it won’t be long before alpha invites for the new Digg are sent out.

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Update: Here’s our follow-up to this story: “Inside the New Digg: An Interview with CEO Jay Adelson.”

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At the “Bigg Digg Shindigg” event at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference (SXSWi), Digg CEO Jay Adelson revealed that the popular social bookmarking site is getting a major overhaul, teasing the audience about new features such as personalized feeds and the return of the DiggDigg leaderboard.

The new version of the website is not yet available. However, if you visit New.Digg.com, you can sign up for the alpha and see a preview of what the new Digg will look like in the background. Mr. Adelson told the crowd that the site was “five years in the making.”

While the company didn’t reveal much about the new website, it seems that there will be a cleaner interface, more personalization options, the ability to submit news items with one click, and a leaderboard for top users.

Digg’s famous website buttons are also getting revamped. In fact, if you Digg an article on MashableMashable, you will see the new buttons in action, as we are currently helping test them.

We’re going to try to put up a video of the announcement, along with more details on the new version of Digg as soon as we can. In the meantime, I’ve put up screenshots from New.Digg.com and enhanced the brightness to make viewing the new interface easier.

Update: Digg’s Steve French left some more interesting information in the Digg comment thread for this post. Here it is in its entirety:

“Top to bottom, the entire company has been in overdrive for this project. There are amazing things coming, and I’m glad the screen shots and presentation didn’t spill everything we have in the works for you guys.

My favorite new feature… it’s *blazing* fast. There has been a lot of effort that’s gone into the architecture and monitoring of performance.”

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