Apart from all the old pages being 404 (which is a huge mishap). Nitpicking on html is a fun and amusing pastime, but unless the page is deformed in some way, it falls into the "shit nobody cares about" category.
It falls into the "shit that will bite you in the ass one day" category. It's about engineering quality, and it goes all the way down to the stuff we don't see.
Given Digg's history, it's a bit of a red flag. However, it all depends on how this technical debt is managed. If this is an alpha release under the heading "release early, release often" and the tech debt is known, there's nothing alarming about it. But if this is truly considered a final product than it makes you question how capable these people are to revive Digg.
Either way, some of these issues suggest simply a lack of skill/knowledge rather than deliberate tech debt. That's not a good sign.
This is an MVP. The team is (apparently, from what I've read), doing quick iteration, fast cycles, and this is an MVP.
In fact, I think these nitpicks are an excellent sign for digg. They discarded anything which was useless for their launch. Very well done - an excellent MVP.
To get a website up and running, most of what I listed falls indeed in the 20% category (80/20).
But if you care about accessibility, usability and SEO you should probably care about HTML issues like pagespeed and validation.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0
Create documents that validate to published formal
grammars.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/response-times.html
Users still hate slow sites and don't hesitate telling us.
Google Webmaster Guidelines (Design & Content)
Check for broken links and correct HTML.
So perhaps it is the "shit nobody, but front-end engineers, should care about" category.
That's not the point. Why rush the release when you know that historically Digg had problems with losing people because they severely botched a redesign?
Didn't Digg at one point purge their comments and there was a huge uproar? The new management shouldn't have went online without the migrated data, or at the very least, the user profiles.
Was the data included in the purchase of the sale?
I am looking at the login page and it seems to require Facebook authentication, and not even an option to use my old Digg.com account. In the FAQ it implies that eventually the old data will return.
I'm starting to feel like they decided to release a work-in-progress to capitalize on the wave of press they've received due to the sale. Most people had high hopes for the new management, and releasing early with a product that is less than half finished really causes a smell.
The data was bundled with the domain sale, thankfully. It's a shitty move that they took it offline for an unspecified duration, and that they don't plan to handle existing urls.
That's completely insane. A new design is one thing, but there needs to be a clear and concise reason to break away from URLs that have been indexed, and are likely huge in page rankings.
