Digg.com is just wrapping up it’s first ever town hall webcast.
Hosted by Digg founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, the virtual townhall was born out of some growing concerns among the social voting site’s users. For an hour and a half, the two tech idols sat and answered user-submitted questions that covered everything from the newest algorithm changes to spam issues.
At its peak, the Ustream webcast had somewhere around 1,900 viewers. There was also a live chat set up at diggtownhall.com (not sponsored by Digg) with some of the site’s most popular users participating.
For those of you who missed it or had trouble streaming the feed, here are some of the highlights from Jay and Kevin’s answers. I know I missed some, so feel free to add them in the “Comment” section.
1) “Super-users” do not exist. There’s apparently no such thing as a Digg user with super Digg or Bury powers, as has been speculated over the past few months. However, there’s always an administrator or moderator on duty to uphold the site’s Terms of Service.
“We rely on the users to police the site; not secret moderators,” Jay said.
2) The site currently receives 26 million unique visits per month.
3) Since launch, the site has received over 200,000,000 Diggs.
4) There is an anti-gaming system in place to detect and remove spam from the Upcoming sections of each category. But there’s no auto-bury feature currently built into the site.
5) Digg is adding several forums across the site that permit users to discuss site issues and/or talk about topics that interest them (i.e. Tech).
6) The site will continue to hide the list of those users who Bury each story. But they will be adding in a listing of the number of Diggs and Buries each story receives.
7) They are working to fix the long broken “Search” functionality.
8 ) Neither Kevin or Jay seemed to be concerned with how the “Shout” functionality currently works, so it doesn’t sound as though we’ll be getting any changes there.
9) Neither Kevin or Jay would comment on the site being for sale.
10) The site is open to the idea of having more focus groups for the testing of new features on the site. They’ll be discussing this more at the next town hall session….
…which just happens to be on May 28th.
All in all, it was a really nice webcast that addressed a number of growing questions/concerns that were on top of many Diggers’ minds.
I have to say that Jay and Kevin did a really superb job in opening up the lines of communication with their users.
It was just a little over a month ago when a minor revolution was taking place among Digg’s most powerful users. A select group of Diggers were unhappy with changes that were being implemented at the site, and complained of a lack of communication from the support team.
But, thanks to a willingness to engage in a free-flowing dialog with their users, Kevin and Jay seem to have quickly put out a fire that was still smoldering.
As with all popular web destinations (especially ones that appeal to the more tech-savvy crowd), it’s impossible to please everyone. However, Digg’s founders have really made a concerted effort to keep the communication flowing and seem to be taking a number of the users’ suggestions into consideration.
As word of mouth marketers, tonight’s town hall a prime example of a company recognizing that their customers are their most valuable assets. Without a steady user base and support from their most passionate loyalists, Digg.com would just be another tadpole in the Web 2.0 pond.
Nice work, Digg.
