Anyone checked out Digg.com lately? If you have, you may have noticed that the social news bookmarking website has had its guts ripped out as part of a total revamp following its takeover by New York-based Betaworks.

Digg’s new owners can be commended for a couple of things. Having decided to revert to start-up mode again, the entire website has been built on fresh code, rewritten using Agile development methods, and re-launched in record-breaking time – just six weeks to the day that Betaworks snapped up its name and URL for $500,000. There’s also no disputing that the new Digg looks a whole lot cleaner than it did following the previous owner’s Version 4 redesign, which effectively dug the site’s own grave.

But there are two HUGE flaws with the new Digg.

Firstly, one of Digg’s most crucial elements has now been stripped away; once upon a time, the old Digg was one of the most popular discussion sites on the web. Now, there are no discussions at all, no comments, no arguments, no abuse, no nothing…  Just post, “Digg” and read, that’s it. Without the discussions, no doubt many users will be wondering what the point of it all is, given it doesn’t offer us anything that we can’t do on countless other news sites.

The second problem is that all users are now required to login with Facebook if they wish to post news and ‘Digg’ stories they like. Betaworks say that this is to fight spammers, but what they’ve gone and done is nothing short of criminal – they’ve basically deleted more than 14 million pages of content, including user profiles, submissions, fascinating comment threads, everything. In one fell swoop, Digg have undone the work of dedicated users who have spent years building their profiles, and it remains to be seen if any of this data will ever be recovered. Certainly, it doesn’t look like there’s a place for it in the new Digg.

Being linked to Facebook will also mean that your Digg activity gets posted onto your timeline as well – admittedly not a major problem, but irritating enough. And for those who don’t have Facebook? Simple – they don’t get to play on Digg anymore.

Digg might be able to attract some new users with its clean and fresh look, but will the old users come back? After Betaworks has basically treated them like crap (to put it lightly) it doesn’t seem too likely…