A few weeks ago, the Bounty Fishing blog came out with an excellent and well-thought-out blog post about 27 Aquatic Lifeforms You Never Caught While Fishing. The story did quite well on Digg and on Reddit, with Reddit users noticing that one of the fish forms actually looked very much like the Reddit logo.

So what did Reddit founder Alexis Ohanion do? He changed the Reddit logo to that aquatic lifeform for several hours.

That story hit the front page of Reddit and on Digg, and 67 people voted on my comment:

Props to Reddit for visibly interacting with the community it serves.

Beyond the cool factor, Reddit is easily getting new users by paying attention to its user base and even creating surprises when not even necessary. (And Reddit doesn’t stop there.)

It’s great to build a self-sustainable social network and then be able to sit back and relax while the users run the show. It’s even better when you take part in the everyday details of your site and focus on your user’s experience. Not long ago, I wrote about how 17-year-old Andrew Sutherland was doing this on Quizlet. His site is successful on its own, but his involvement makes the user experience all the more enjoyable.

After writing my piece on why the new Digg just isn’t what it used to be, I already started listening to community feedback regarding the social network that I thought was worth sharing. Since the Digg submission of my story was already buried, I sincerely hope that Digg listens to what their community members have to say.

1. By trying to make Digg more social, it really became less social. (Michael via Twitter)
2. [Today is] the day that Digg died. (Lyndon)
3. I also can’t see if I have Dugg a story until I open it. (webcure)
4. I don’t like that I have to click 2 times to see an article. (webcure)
5. If friends are deemphasized, why does the algorithm still continue to penalize the “top submitters?”
6. WTF, you can only go back 3 pages of friends submissions now? (Alex)
7. It’s ironic that Kevin Rose said that he likes to “build things you click on.” Is that why we have to click twice?
8. Talk about memory leaks in Firefox now that I have to open more windows. If this is a way to thwart blind digging, it’s not working.

I have about 20 minutes to give my initial impressions on the new Digg profile redesign but have arrived at my conclusion: it sucks.

A few things come to mind based on everything I’ve used Digg for in the past:

1. Digg took a step backwards in social news and took a step forward on social superfluity. Digg is now letting you send shout outs to your friends but doesn’t emphasize the initial foundation upon which the site was created: Digg is a social news site. I already turned off shouts; I use Digg for news. Not for Facebook-Myspace-Yahoo! Mash-like social networks. Merging the two when there’s already too much of it in the open is totally unnecessary.
2. Where did the descriptions go? Now, I can’t see descriptions of the stories I’ve submitted nor can I see descriptions of stories that my friends have submitted. Since most of us use descriptions from the article text itself, it’s rather pointless to remove story descriptions because now I cannot easily discern if I’ve read the story or not before.

Seriously, guys. I’m getting bombarded with BlogRush requests from left and right. Even Sphinn has seen its share of requests.

My question for you all is: Why?

For those of you who don’t know, BlogRush is essentially a traffic exchange BlogRoll. You install a widget on your site and get “free syndicated blog traffic” (if people click on the links!)

As I said this morning on Search Engine Roundtable, I admit, there are some pretty good spokespeople who are helping promote the product. I’ve read from Jeremy Schoemaker, Andy Beal, Maki, John Chow, Sean at Mashable, and Darren Rowse, among others.

But here’s the only thing Blogrush has going for it right now:

One word: Hype. That’s it.

Ben Cook wrote an incredible review about the shortcomings of BlogRush. His post is worth a read (there were referral concerns at first, as all URLs contain a referral ID; this seems to be addressed now, however), but there are other issues that bother me.

You might think it’s all fun and games when you become a top submitter on a social news site. However, that’s not exactly the case. The more popular you get you get, the harder it is. It’s a natural progression of what some people might consider “celebrity” status: once you hit fame, you’re also scrutinized a lot more closely. You’re no longer really sailing smoothly, and the critics abound.

I learned a lot after writing my open letter to Kevin Rose. I learned that six months ago, I was a different type of Digg user. I learned that there are people who are merely spectators. Some of these people seek out discussion. Some of these people look to simply vote on stories and use Digg as a bookmarking tool, which is primarily where I started when I first signed up to use Digg. Then there are others who primarily focus on contributing content to Digg.

Six months ago, I wouldn’t have liked myself as I use Digg today. There’s no real way to explain that except to say that it’s not easy to jump into the head of someone who submits heavily to Digg unless you’re one of those people. It’s a completely different mindset and one that, for me, took months of study. I can have this discussion on Digg for hours, but nobody will be able to relate unless they’ve been there.