On our last show I (Urgo) went off a bit on a rant of two things that really were bugging me with recent changes in the past week from Digg and YouTube. I just wanted to say that both of these sites listened to Social Blade (and/or other users complaints) and have reversed the changes within the past 24 hours!
YouTube
The problem was that if you utilized the Subscriptions section of the site where it would show you all of the new videos from everyone you subscribed to, instead of showing all videos by default it only showed videos from the first 20 people you had subscribed to. Sure there was a “more” button that could be clicked on to show all of them, but most users probably wouldn’t notice this causing two problems, 1) Video makers videos wouldn’t be seen and 2) If you subscribed to someone expecting to see their latest videos you’d be missing a lot.
No matter if YouTube fixed it due to the response from twitter, or our show I am happy to say this issue has now been resolved. Thank you YouTube!
Digg
Digg’s problem with similar in that they were taking away part of the site but in a little bit of a different way. On Digg you have a headline and a description on the front page. Titles are limited to 60 characters, and descriptions are limited to 350 characters. The problem was only the first 120 characters of the description were getting shown on the front page of digg and then you had to click on the digg link of the story to read the full description, or click through to the story itself. While this change I’m sure generated a lot more traffic for stories themselves, and the digg story page, it really hurt the user experience by not showing the full abstract of the story that someone took the time to write up.
I had noticed this problem earlier in the week and had filed a bug report with digg that just came back with a canned response thanking me for filing a bug report, but then, sometime between when the last episode of Social Blade aired and this morning digg had resolved the bug / rolled back their changes. Thanks Digg!
Quite honestly I wasn’t expecting either of these big sites to change these back, but no matter if it was really a bug or if it was a feature that they got backlash from, thanks for listening to us & kudos for Digg & YouTube for reversing the changes.
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Really enjoyed this episode. Thanks for posting it.