A couple weeks ago, I was totally floored by the news that Digg had been sold to Betaworks for a grand total of $500,000. In a world where Facebook is snatching up photo-sharing apps for $1B apiece, Digg’s six-figure price tag just seemed… beyond pathetic.

However, if you read past the headlines, you probably noticed that Digg accepted the pitiful offer because it saw Betaworks as a way to bounce back. Well, now you can be the judge.

After a 6-week hiatus, Betaworks has relaunched Digg as an editorial curation site that bears, well… I’ll just go ahead and say it, pretty much ZERO resemblance to the original Digg in either design or philosophy.

In fact, you can’t even comment  on stories on the new and improved Digg (yet). Oddly enough, even the “Submit a Link” button was giving me an error when I tried t…

As far as engagement, your options are as follows:

In a lot of ways, I think the cleaner, smarter new-look Digg.com is a step in the right direction, i.e. away from the digital mob-mentality that initially made Digg great, but eventually made it almost irrelevant as a news source.

Still, it bears little relation to the old Digg…

Here’s a message from the new management:

On July 20, we announced that we were turning Digg back into a startup and rebuilding it from scratch in six weeks. After an intense month and a half, we managed to get the new Digg up and running on a fresh code base and infrastructure. We now have a solid foundation on which to build, and we expect to build fast. Yesterday, we previewed the new Digg applications for web, iPhone, and mobile web and today we’re happy to share Digg v1.

Another thing that the new Digg is doing right is focusing on mobile and cross-platform sharing. The mobile app is really nothing special, and I don’t see any immediate improvement over other curated news apps, but the simplicity is kind of nice. The new Digg seems pretty sustainable, though unsexy.