Reddit benefits from Digg site revamp

The site's founder has responded to some of Digg user's criticisms

A revamp of the social-news site Digg has unexpectedly backfired on its owners.

Members of the site who wanted to express their dissatisfaction with a recent redesign hijacked the front page to redirect users to rival service Reddit.

Reddit said that it had received around 250,000 extra page views from the stunt.

Both sites allow users to submit links and rate news pages.

Digg has always dominated Reddit. However, on Monday, the smaller site saw unique visitors increase by nearly a half, according to a blog by the Reddit team.

"We had some interesting traffic yesterday," it read. "It was quite a ride - it actually jammed up our internal traffic tracker for a while."

The increase was due to Digg users submitting links to the site in protest at last week's revamp of the site.

The relaunch removed features including a "bury" button, used by people to vote stories off the site, and an "upcoming stories" feature which allowed users to preview and vet stories that may have made it on to the front page of the site.

In addition, many Digg users have complained that the new design favours links from large, established media companies over those from individual users.

The criticisms forced Kevin Rose, the founder of the site, to write a blog post responding to 16 complaints.

"Our top priority is to stabilise the site, then we'll look at the data/feedback and make decisions on what to change going forward," he wrote.

However, his comments were not enough to prevent Digg's once-loyal users from hijacking the site. At one point, six out of the seven top stories on Digg pointed to Reddit.

Digg's revamp was aimed at re-invigorating the site as more people turn to services such as Facebook and Twitter to share links and news stories.