If you don't see this as clearly labeled ads than I believe something is wrong with your eyes. http://i.imgur.com/8Djg7.jpg
The "digg-style" ads also lights up on mouse over. I know this sucks and feels like being duped, but if user gets duped by this kind of ads, they probably deserve to get duped. But they paraded the idea (more than once) months before running it to make sure everyone understands what going on, both within digg in the form of digg blog posts which was on the front page and outside digg in the form of interviews to tech sites like techcrunch, which were also on the digg frontpage.
I am not a big fan of digg, I much prefer Reddit. But Reddit has almost the exact same system as digg (I think reddit's system was live first).
Its easy to sit in your chair and criticize, but someone's gotta pay the bills.
>if user gets duped by this kind of ads, they probably deserve to get duped.
This is not the correct way to think about the user experience
I'm wearing my glasses, and it honestly took me about 30 seconds of scanning to figure out which of those articles was an ad. Now think about the readwriteweb/facebook fiasco (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo...) and consider how an average person interprets that page.
As much as I don't like digg, I think it is fair to say that the avg digg/reddit users are more tech savvy than facebook/myspace users. So this is not an equal comparison.
The "digg-style" ads also lights up on mouse over. I know this sucks and feels like being duped, but if user gets duped by this kind of ads, they probably deserve to get duped. But they paraded the idea (more than once) months before running it to make sure everyone understands what going on, both within digg in the form of digg blog posts which was on the front page and outside digg in the form of interviews to tech sites like techcrunch, which were also on the digg frontpage.
I am not a big fan of digg, I much prefer Reddit. But Reddit has almost the exact same system as digg (I think reddit's system was live first).
Its easy to sit in your chair and criticize, but someone's gotta pay the bills.