Digg founder Kevin Rose cheerfully responds to the mountains of criticism around the newly launched Digg 4. His overall theme is that users need to deal with it.

But VP of Engineering John Quinn is now gone, as the big advocate behind alpha-type Cassandra database stuff replacing MYSQL.   Obviously a distributed database that is scalable and fast is perfect but when you have tens of millions of users and take a flier on something untested, your job is on the line.  

Do I care? No, but readers here might. Digg's internal auto-bury scandal a few years ago - which boosted paying sites and penalized non-paying sites who were about to make the front page (like us) - and its persistent gimmicky by marketing people made it a non-entity here, though obviously a number of science sites who play the game have done well with them.



Hopefully the new system will fix all that.  Rose has always been a good guy who cared enough to make the thing so for that reason alone I want him to win.

But hand-picking a few top sites that will always be highlighted for people is essentially exercising editorial control and then hoping it becomes Twitter is Pownce-type followership, and I am not sure that will be the wave of the future.