For those of us who have used Digg daily for the past 5 years, seeing the image above when visiting the site is both exhilarating and terrifying. It has our blood pumping because it represents a new hope, a chance to salvage what’s left of the once-dominant social news site. It’s also scary as it could mark the official beginning of the end for an old friend.

For their part, Betaworks has done a great job at communicating with the community and keeping their plans relatively transparent. In their last post, they offered up screen shots of some of the earlier designs and concepts behind the site, some of which were presented to the board prior to purchase to demonstrate that they had a plan. This is encouraging but most are still skeptical. It’s not that we aren’t embracing the change. It’s that the majority of us wish that the change had come before the site fell to obscurity…

…or even better, that they had never tried their ambitious and utterly failed attempt to revamp the site for V4 in late 2010.

We’ll be watching very closely to see when the site goes back up and what the changes look like.