Digg is in danger of being buried. The social news site's traffic is down 26 percent in the U.S. after the launch of a controversial redesign in August.

"Having been a paragon of social bookmarking with over 40 million unique visitors a month at its peak there has been a huge exodus of traffic thanks to an unpopular redesign which irritated a legion of faithful power users," Robin Goad, U.K. research director for analyst firm Hitwise, wrote in a blog post.

Since the end of August, traffic to Digg in the U.S. has dropped by 26 percent, Goad said. In the U.K., it is down 34 percent.

Critics said the redesign has alienated users. The new edition, Digg v4, was intended to curb the overwhelming authority of the dominant power users, placing influence back in the hands of everyday users.

"Version 4 was intended to recalibrate the balance of power on Digg, making it once again a forum of the online community rather than the domain of the 'Diggerati,'" Goad wrote.

The new version has assumed changes more in line with the most popular social-networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook. It's more personalized; Users have to sign up to follow friends and other publishers. Link sharing is easier, too. Just three clicks, and the link, title, and description are published. Digg also eschewed its "bury" feature, which blocked more unpopular stories from the site. But the changes have rocked the prevailing balance of power. There is speculation that former Digg users will defer to competitor reddit.com, but according to Goad, reddit's traffic has only increased by 2.6 percent.

For more details, see PCMag's full review of the new Digg.