The new Digg is just as much community as it is a social news tool, at least if you want it to be. You can add links to other online presences you might have, upload a few photos, avatars of course, write a short bio… It goes on, very community-ish indeed.
You can also send shouts to your friends, with links and whatnot. At first I got a few “welcome to Digg” and other pleasantries.
Then it degraded.
To spam.
It appears that, in search of even more diggs to push a story to the front page and beyond, people just can’t keep their voice down.
I don’t like it. The shout feature is OK by itself, but trusting the users to use it responsibly is obviously a mistake.
I want a gag feature.
I agree wholeheartedly. I hadn’t been accepting any friend requests either, because 1) I didn’t know them and 2) I didn’t want to have my friend’s activity page clogged up with crap. I turned off shouts for non-friends after I got 3 spam shouts in a 10 minute period and now I’m thinking of turning them off for good because I have a few friends that spam me all the time with “digg this please” bullshit. I’ll digg it if I want to, thank you very much.
I agree…I would love to see a gag option.