Digg finally implemented threaded comments yesterday, and the top story on Digg right now is a harsh criticism of the new system. The consensus appears to be that while the new system is a step forward in terms of technical functionality, it's two steps back for usability.

New features on a large community site will always draw complaints from a vocal minority, so Digg may just have to wait a few days for these users to get acclimated to the changes. My personal opinion is that it's definitely a good step to allow for true replies and threading, but the system seems over-engineered. Having to click to see any replies is a poor design choice, and with all the extra borders and headers, the page gets cluttered very quickly.

My unsolicited advice to Digg is to follow Netscape's or Reddit's lead and simplify what you've got. Drop the "click to view replies" links, keep the pagination ("Click to view the next 50 comments"), and get rid of about half of the extra borders and headers that have been added. Do this and you'll get one of your famous "We love Digg for listening to us" frontpage stories, and the deluge of feedback e-mail I'm sure you're getting will slow to a trickle.

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/06/20

In other Digg news, the fatal flaw with some Digg RSS feeds that I first mentioned here exactly 2 months ago still has not been fixed. I had gotten my hopes up since Digg was down for hours the other day, but still no luck.

If you'd like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/06/13

If you'd like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

This link to the Navigator 9 download page was submitted to Digg around noon on Tuesday and received 10 diggs over the next 24 hours. A story about a Firefox-based browser release submitted by a top-100 Digger? That sounds like possible front-page material to me - why only 10 diggs? Maybe it's because the story was excluded from Digg's search results: it doesn't appear in results for netscape or navigator. Is it possible that it was buried, and that's why it's not in the regular results?

No, it doesn't appear in the search results for buried stories either. In fact, I can't find it at all by searching on Digg. Has Digg instituted some sort of double secret probation for stories it doesn't want its users finding?

Articles about the release of the Navigator 9 Beta have been all over the Web today. Here are the major ones that I've spotted:

Slashdot: First Peek at Netscape Navigator 9

Fark: Netscape releases a new browser. In other news, Netscape still makes a browser

456 Berea Street: Software Update Day

Pronet Advertising: Netscape Navigator 9 Released - The Social Browser Has Landed

Linux.com: Netscape releases Netscape Navigator 9 beta 1

Download Squad: Netscape Navigator 9 Beta 1 released

Webware: Hands-on with Netscape's new social browser

Mac Daily News: Netscape Navigator 9.0 beta 1 released

Beta News: Netscape Browser Becomes 'Navigator' Again