Love the new Digg or hate it, the controversy surrounding its launch is a big deal.

The Digg user community is in the throes of a chaotic and noisy protest, clamoring for the ending of numerous griefs that they feel the fourth version of Digg is causing them.

What Digg’s plan is for the next few days is somewhat up in the air, but tweets from Kevin Rose seem to point to a course of changes that will placate the most aggrieved users that make Digg what it is.

Part of the protest that was thrown up yesterday was to promote the Reddit Digg account, and to shift all its stories to more than just the Digg ‘Top News’ frontpage, but to the top ten list as well. In short, to raise a ruckus, Digg users made Reddit take over Digg for the day. That is old news, what is new are the numbers that Reddit has posted on just what happened during that surge.

Reddit had several main claims: Digg sent us 250,000 hits which is about 1/7th of our normal traffic, new signups spiked, and our servers did not collapse.

Two things spring to mind. First, Reddit’s claim of a quarter million hits from Digg during the period seems very low. Based on personal experience, taking up as many slots as Reddit did on the Digg top ten, they should have seen a least twice the traffic that they did. This leads us to point two: either Digg’s move towards ‘My News’ is working, and users are beginning to shift their focus there, or Digg’s traffic is down. Time will tell.

Reddit, a very open place, was kind enough to share some very interesting graphs for their day in the Digg spotlight. This is their new user sign up rate:

And this is their traffic tab, tracking their served impressions per hour:

However you slice it, Digg sent Reddit hundreds of thousands of new visitors, hardly the way the Digg crew wanted to celebrate the launch of their long awaited, and much toiled over, new site. If you were Digg, what would you do?

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