Propeller's suicidal move drive by jealousy over Digg

If you’re a new social media site going up against an industry leader such as Digg, what could probably your best bet against it? Being under the umbrella of one of the major internet media player might actually. Such is the case of AOL’s Propeller social news portal. Propeller was a direct competitor to Digg. It first launched in June 2006 under the Netscape.com domain as “a better Digg” in that paid editors chose the top stories from user-submitted and voted links. Soon the site was paying top Digg users to move to them.

Propeller.com, Aol’s 2nd try at social media, after netscape.com was thrown into the dupster, relaunched today with a new look and feel. The site sports a new design and logo and now has a mascot - described as “part professor, part citizen journalist”. But the biggest feature change is the removal of a pure Digg-like vote count. In its place is an algorithm based popularity ranking of 1-10, which takes into account “many more aspects of participation” when determining popularity. Voting on a story is now called the more nebulous “prop it.” The service has also cut down the number of news categories. Those remaining include Arts & Entertainment, Business & Finance, Family, Humor, News, Science & Technology, Sports and Style.

But the biggest feature change is the removal of a pure Digg-like vote count. In its place is an algorithm based popularity ranking of 1-10, which takes into account “many more aspects of participation” when determining popularity. Voting on a story is now called the more nebulous “prop it.” The service has also cut down the number of news categories. Those remaining include Arts & Entertainment, Business & Finance, Family, Humor, News, Science & Technology, Sports and Style.

The Propeller.com recent layout change pissed off many of its members. Its bugs, non-user-friendliness, horrible outlook and not issuing user manual created great deal of fuss. People protested by "Proping" the stories complaining the issues. But then the AOL team replied with a big "thank you" and removed those article as a violation of their Terms of Services.

The “new” design of propeller is a massive failure to understand why users were attracted to the old version. The “frontpage of propeller” was never very attractive - too many of the front page stories were simply emotional shouting matches about trivial issues with no interesting information or substance. The real attraction of propeller were the back and forth user comments and discussions on a waide variety of stories, many of which never reached the front page. One could learn a lot from these debates.

Miserably Failure isn’t only being used to describe the old-school “google bomb” any more.

Here’s the home page of Propeller.com right now:

So what are others saying?

Top Story on New Propeller Says it All - There aren’t a whole lot of things that you can say. While there seems to be some pretty nifty features available now, this just isn’t what everyone was waiting for. Some people we’ve spoken to about it are downright angry.

Propeller Takes on Digg and Other Social News Portal - By all means, Propeller has the making of great social news portal.However, it is not free of spammers and users who will try to make the site as undesirable as they can with their nasty and objectionable comments. Hence, to prevent these people from polluting the site, Propeller is a fully moderated site by its editorial team as well as some help from the Propeller community members as well.

Propeller 2.0 Launches: Ditching The Vote Count, Adding A Mascot - Propeller, AOL’s Digg-like news site, launches version 2.0 later this morning. The site sports a new design and logo and now has a mascot - described as “part professor, part citizen journalist” (see image below).