A few weeks ago, the Bounty Fishing blog came out with an excellent and well-thought-out blog post about 27 Aquatic Lifeforms You Never Caught While Fishing. The story did quite well on Digg and on Reddit, with Reddit users noticing that one of the fish forms actually looked very much like the Reddit logo.

So what did Reddit founder Alexis Ohanion do? He changed the Reddit logo to that aquatic lifeform for several hours.

That story hit the front page of Reddit and on Digg, and 67 people voted on my comment:

Props to Reddit for visibly interacting with the community it serves.

Beyond the cool factor, Reddit is easily getting new users by paying attention to its user base and even creating surprises when not even necessary. (And Reddit doesn’t stop there.)

It’s great to build a self-sustainable social network and then be able to sit back and relax while the users run the show. It’s even better when you take part in the everyday details of your site and focus on your user’s experience. Not long ago, I wrote about how 17-year-old Andrew Sutherland was doing this on Quizlet. His site is successful on its own, but his involvement makes the user experience all the more enjoyable.

Just a few weeks ago, I posted about how Kevin Rose was Digg’s brainchild and that his vision probably differs from the vision of the top users. I understand that Digg founders have other projects, but that should not preclude the Digg founders from being more involved in the online services that they helped build. It would help them understand where their users are coming from when we ask for more transparency. It would help if there was more communication, like warnings on the site before scheduled downtime. (I’ve asked for that before, Mr. Rose.) It would help prevent posts like these. Better yet, the fact that they show that they listen (beyond for damage control purposes) would be a wonderful thing.