I just noticed that Digg now has all their outbound links aimed at these awful new frame-URLs. I didn't realize they were doing that as well.
This is very disappointing.
I run a niche social news site, so I've spent hours and hours comparing and studying what's out there.
Most social news sites are, spammy SERP factories. They lift other people's content in the hope of getting enough Google mojo that their site will outrank the original source of the content in SERPS. That's the business model.
For a long time, the easiest way to tell the difference between a legit aggregator and a crummy one was to see where their headlines pointed.
If you go to a crummy aggregator like Mixx.com, the headlines on the front page don't point you to the site whose content they're lifting, they point you to a Mixx summary page where there's just a single blue link that will lead you to the source of the information.
Obviously this is done to boost pageviews and to keep the user on the site, rather than letting them get to the information they're looking for.
This always seemed like the obvious way to do things. Lame, too.
And yet Digg and Reddit's headlines have always sent you to the actual sites. And I really, really respected them for this. Whenever I'd see a new social news site doing something sketchy, I'd take comfort in the fact that the two biggest players were also the ones taking the most generous, "good" approaches.
I guess it was only a matter of time before one of them gave in and did something that's actually worse in some respects than directing to a summary page: hijacking the brand, URL, and advertising of the sites that it links to.
Digg is a very influential site. As disappointed as I am in the company for doing this, I'm even more worried about other sites looking at this and saying "fuck it, we're doing it too, now."
Imagine if every link on CNN, NYTimes, MSNBC, WashingtonPost.com led to framed pages.
We all complain about mainstream news never linking to the sites it covers. Well as soon as they figure out how to frame all outbound links and run ads around them, you can bet they'll be linking out all the time.
Facebook beat them to it ;)
Agreed, though I predict it will quickly fall to the same fate as the popup. It will go beyond a certain threshold of annoyingness and then websites, users, and browsers will block them out of existence.
I mean that given the simplicity of how to use this (just prefix with digg.com), the number of stories dugg, and the level of interaction with Digg will both go up significantly. The toolbar (if we call it that) has Digg tools built in (related stories, etc...) and has sharing tools for Twitter, FB, email, etc. This is all designed to drive traffic to the main digg.com site.
