A Turning Point For Digg

Enjoy the fine mess, Matt Williams. Digg’s newly announced CEO has the privilege of cleaning up after a redesign that has users up in arms, the social news site scrambling to add back old features and rival Reddit surging.

Digg co-founder and interim CEO Kevin Rose recently called the job of running Digg “a pain in the ass that I would never wish on my worst enemy”, and that was two weeks before a Digg redesign rolled out to highly unfavourable reviews. It’s not Rose’s pain any more; he’s resuming his duties as Digg’s chief architect and installed Amazon veteran Williams as CEO today.

Williams must now quell an audience rebellion and, apparently, fend off an ascendant rival: The controversy over Digg’s redesign has sent traffic at rival Reddit surging, according to numbers floated by ReadWriteWeb:

After stepping into the CEO role to clean up what he saw as the DiggBar mess left by fellow co-founder Jay Adelson, Rose is now leaving his own successor with mop-up duty. It’s Digg tradition now.