I’m not quite sure when Digg introduced the new ‘Shout’ feature, but it is really starting to drive me crazy. I’m not a very active Digg user, but since the introduction of Shouts I’ve received over 1,000 Shouts. Some of my friends are now sending me so many Shouts that I just delete them automatically as I’m getting far too many to deal with.
In the past, I’ve been guilty of asking friends to Digg the occasional post and this behaviour was supposedly frowned upon, so it seems weird that Digg are now effectively facilitating this! The Shout function must surely be ruining Digg’s promotion mechanism, as people who have friends that respond to Shouts must surely get on the homepage more frequently.
I have a sneaky feeling that Digg have introduced the Shout feature to pull people back into the site, in an attempt to increase activity i.e. once users have responded to a Shout, they will look at other Digg submissions, generating vital page views and maybe even click on a banner or two.
What do you think?
