Yesterday, the popular social content site, Digg, made some pretty drastic changes to its taxonomy. This change certainly softened the corners of the traditionally tech driven social site, providing a greater diversity of content options. There is a new Lifestyle category and greater prominence for Sports and Entertainment categories. Additionally, Offbeat, which has historically served as the catch all for stories that didn’t fit elsewhere, has been broken out into its own category with a variety of subcats.

It will be interesting to see how the fork-tongued Digg hard corps react to this invitation to art and puppy lovers to join their ranks. My guess is that it could go one of two ways:

1) They leave and find the next best thing. This is a tech savvy crowd that knows it and prides themselves on being hip to the coolest new thing out there. It is possible that this process was already underway.

2) They go the way of Phish fans following the break up of the Greatful Dead in the mid 90’s. Before I go on, while I enjoy the music of both bands, I am by no means a die-hard fan of either. which I think gave me a more neutral take on the situation. When the The Dead broke up and all these people flooded over to start going to Phish concerts, it seemed that Phish fans felt the needed to super-charge their fan-dom and fight the yuppie-posers (ie Me) who were encroaching on their thing. While hateful comments are already the norm, it’s possible that veteran Diggers may lash out and bury posts in the new categories.

I guess a third option is that veterans actually like the new categories because the new outlets will stop people from posting stories in categories that aren’t a good fit.

I any case, Digg’s reasoning has to be in-part motivated by the need to grow their audience, most likely to make the site more appealing for advertisers or potential buyers. Only time will tell if their approach will achieve that goal or if it will drive away the people that made the site what it is.

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