And this kids is why you don't couple a complete front-end makeover with a back-end overhaul. It's never going to be perfect and bug-less from day one, and user

And this kids is why you don't couple a complete front-end makeover with a back-end overhaul. It's never going to be perfect and bug-less from day one, and users will always equate something wrong on one end with hating the entire redesign. Comments not loading because of some consistency issue? They'll associate it with your new layout and start hating it. The roll-out of features and changes should be gradual and isolated from one another. Theme something different there, move that widget to the other side, change your navigation scheme, comments are now NoSQL, ok start moving stories to NoSQL, and finally this is our new front-page system of you following users with a customized My News. If any of those individual pieces caused an issue, or there was too much backlash, it wouldn't be associated with the excellent work and effort you've placed into all the other parts of the new site. You get targeted feedback, can quickly squash bugs, and your user-base is now accustomed to what would otherwise be a jarring change. Instead you get Digg v4, with weeks of broken axle pages, entire parts of the site not working, huge features and functions of the old site just completely missing, and what I can imagine is an entire development staff running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to figure out what part of their new system (or multiple parts) are the issue, and how to solve it. Pains me to see them do so much right, yet still get so much terribly wrong.