I am a design engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, working with the Theme Team to address the design concerns of millions of WordPress users.

Monday, February 5th, 2007

Digg removes rank information from profiles (or, Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride)

This morning, Digg removed ranking information from user profiles. I commented on the story, pointing to my top users list for people who were still interested in their rank. Digg CEO Jay Adelson responded to my comment thusly: “We no longer display that rank information, so don’t be surprised if Chris’s list is no longer [...]

This morning, Digg removed ranking information from user profiles. I commented on the story, pointing to my top users list for people who were still interested in their rank. Digg CEO Jay Adelson responded to my comment thusly:

“We no longer display that rank information, so don’t be surprised if Chris’s list is no longer accurate (or stays unchanged). (A Netscape developer?)”

Well, my list has been updated since then, so we can safely assume that I wasn’t using that information (which I’ve said from the beginning). As long as Digg displays the name of the user that submitted each story, it will be trivial to determine the top users. I’ll continue to aggregate the data until I’m forced by Digg (or asked nicely, with a “pretty please”) to take it down.

Side note: I love the “(A Netscape developer?)” parenthetical that Jay included. I’m not sure of its meaning though. Is it “How did a Netscape developer manage to crack our code and get this information?” or is it “Netscape has developers now?” In any case, it’s irrelevant, but I still laughed.


5 Responses to “Digg removes rank information from profiles (or, Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride)”

  1. Eliot Says:

    The fact that we don’t throw a party every time we do a minor feature release perplexes them.

  2. ryland2 Says:

    What the hell is digg doing, removing our list and then even removing our rank as well. They cant seem to stop, today adding that stupid layout clearly designed to add another annoying add… (of coarse I use firefox but the white space is very annoying)

  3. ryland2 Says:

    Wow, as you know the profile views was removed. I dont know what is happening but the profile veiws section in the list is WAY off… it had previously said about 6000 and now its under 3.

  4. ryland2 Says:

    Sorry, looking back that wasn’t the profile views section (either way i am for some reason ranked lower then i was)

  5. HMTKSteve Says:

    What’s next? Will they just get rid of all user names?


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