Digg is a classic example of a webpage getting a working model right, totally by accident. This happens quite a lot in that they cobble something together and it got trajectory. Their downfall is thinking they actually knew what they were doing and therein lies their problem. They had no clue and they changed it causing the whole thing to crater.
> Their downfall is thinking they actually knew what they were doing and therein lies their problem.
I read an interview with the PlentyOfFish founder and he alluded to this.
People would ask him why his site looked so bad compared to other dating sites. He said he he was afraid trying to make it better would make it worse. In reality he didn't know why people liked his site so much but it was working.
So he ended up working a couple hours each morning checking for spam and paying bills and took the rest of the day off instead of trying to constantly "improve" the site.
In my role as unofficial, self-appointed late-stage Digg historian [0], it's my belief that Digg ultimately had to change as the Google SEO changes had fatally wounded its near-profitability. Further, as a VC funded company it made the inevitable (and I think best for everyone involved) decision to modernize in an attempt to be a member of the Facebook, Twitter cohort rather than experience a long-term shrinking into mediocrity.
But was it by accident? They had a template to work from. The original idea behind Digg was to fix what Kevin perceived was broken with Slashdot. They did that. Mission accomplished. Could have been a fine small/lifestyle business for years. Taking VC cash and everything that necessarily followed was what killed them.
There is a great parallel to this in filmmaking. Some of the greatest films took unexpected turns during production, often forced to change in major ways due to accidents, scheduling conflicts, budget, or last-minute ad-libs which become central themes of their characters. In a number of films, those unplanned additions turned out to be key to the success of the film.
One specific example of this is The Other Side of the Wind, by Orson Welles, in which Welles noted the existence of this magic phenomenon and deliberately sought to make a film centrally driven by happenstance and unscripted ad-libs. In other words: trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
The Hail Mary strategy as described in the first couple paragraphs of TFA makes it pretty clear that senior leadership didn't understand social, at all. "A friend clicked on it" (not even "read it") is such a weak signal I'm sure FB's algorithm promptly buried the links for lack of click through.
Don't change a thing that is working just for the sake of change.
You can see this for successful small family restaurants, they usually don't have a lot of choices and usually do little things very well and stick with them and can last for generations.
It is famously also one of the only well-known startups where the initial version was built by offshore outsourcers, like "exception which only highlights the rule that outsourcing sucks".
As I remember pre the redesign of the Digg front page, it was controlled by "Diggers" who were being paid by blogs and brands for the traffic (Digg.com could deliver 100k>1m+ visitors a post with the right content angles). The redesign was to take back control of the homepage results and be able to charge brands for the exposure. Once the users realised they had little sway in getting a post to the front page they left.
I remember the days when mr babyman and friends controlled the digg front page and all the drama that followed. It was a perfect example of an over aggressive parasite killing the host. Reddit solved it by creating sub-reddits. HN solved it with clear rules and diligent mod work.
> Once the users realised they had little sway in getting a post to the front page they left.
The only reason they left was because there was an alternative - reddit. If reddit wasn't around, digg would have a captive audience and they would be as big as reddit today. Reddit now has the same problem with power users + corporate/news/think tank/political party affiliated subreddit mods with heavy censorship. Fortunately for reddit, there really is no alternative. Also the same thing with youtube. People complain about censorship and mainstream corporate nonsense being peddled on reddit, youtube, etc, but they have nowhere to go.
If digg had waited a few years til reddit folded or they had a secure monopolistic position, they would be relevant today. Digg made the same mistake myspace did, piss off their users with a viable competitor around. And once the migration started, it was over.
It’s a job. I worked for a startup that was burning out and got acquihired. I just left and got a new job, but a few friends stayed because they wanted some form of stability. They got a pretty minimal retention bonus to stay on for at least six months, I think it was under $5k.
I have been part of an acquihire. As an early stage startup employee you work really hard for years, take salary cuts and hope that some day all the hard work will pay off. All of it will be for nothing if there isn't some kind of success/validation. In this case Digg was fairly well known but you don't get much credibility in the job market if the startup was never in the news. So if there is any form of acquisition, you get some of that brand exposure. In my case, even though we had built a great product, I rarely got inbound calls or interest in public forums. Now people reach out to me even when I haven't spent much time in the new company
Yup, when Pixar went public, Jobs decided to keep 100% of the shares. (You could argue that he deserved it, since he spent the majority of his fortune on Pixar and Next.)
So his 4 top managers threatened to quit and derail the IPO.
I check it a few times throughout the day, but idk if it can really be compared to reddit anymore. There aren't any discussions, so it's basically just a more focused manual Google News.
I'm curious about this "everyone must sign" contract mentioned. Since employment is not mandatory, what is stopping the author or anyone from signing and then walking away after 1 day working there?
There is usually some form of compensation attached to it that must be returned if the employee doesn’t satisfy their obligations or is deferred so that the employee is incentivized to stay at least that long. You can quit if you really want to, but you might not want to return the lump sum signing bonus you received a few months ago. Or you decide to stick it out for a year at which point you receive stock.
Sorry, I think that sentence was a bit unclear. What it meant to convey is that we had 200 daily active Facebook uniques, essentially that very few folks used FB to connect to Digg.
One thing that really made reddit different from the other communities that were a thing in its early days was the insistence on wholly-separate subreddits rather than the various overlapping tag schemes which were trendy at the time on delicious, fark, digg, LJ, etc.
I don't know if spez and kn0thing had some special insight about this, but my experience with it over the long term has been that you can be subbed to a few reddits for your preferred niche interests, and enjoy almost complete isolation from whatever toxicity is going on over in r/politics or wherever else (barring the occasional bit of brigading, which is basically just a mess for the smaller-community mods to clean up).
So there's clearly a large number of mainline users who basically just read whatever reddits are default on the logged-out homepage. But I think there's also a super long tail of users who don't read those at all, and my hunch is that it's that long tail of users who have probably sustained the site over the long term, and will continue to give it a lot of resiliency going forward.
There is a post on HN right now about predictions for the next decade. My prediction would be Reddit dying/overtaken by another site in next 2-3 years.
I think Digg/Slashdot/Myspace/Friendster show that on the Internet you're never too big to fail. If someone comes along that does it better right as you make some big blunder (redesigns that primarily cater to advertisers are a common issue) you can lose your userbase seemingly overnight.
What's the leverage the old company has over its engineers when negotiating an acquihire? Why does the new company not approach the lead engineer and the selected employees directly?
Digg was losing so much money and required so much infrastructure to run at the end. I wonder if the team at the time could’ve done a complete restart. I think it required a new team without the history and loyalty to old decisions to move forward. Betaworks was able to right the ship, but it was too late, the world had moved on.
At the time Digg was acquired in name only. The team had a short period to replace the then current (and very expensive) infrastructure and hijack all traffic. They did a pretty awesome tech job of moving to AWS and stopping the bleeding from the then in place bare metal setup. I remember a tech talk where they spoke of the money they saved from moving to AWS, it was substantial and allowed them the resources to try to save the product. Since then it was a re-birthed startup with a new team that had quite a long runway IMHO.
Thanks for writing these stories up - great examples of how the earlier days were the wild west - we were all code cowboys, and it all lead to spectacular failures at times.
I’d like to know why it took them dumping logs into hive to see the traffic came from one article.
I think these two “data scientists” were probably called webmaster or sysadmin and it took them coming in the next morning and grepping the log files. Or looking at google analytics which existed at the time. I don’t remember if real-time was free in 2010, but it could easily tell referrals and passthroughs.
I think social media sites benefit from short term squeeze due to most of them being driven by influence, trends, and generation which dies off after a while. Unless you can retain and acquire users by switching interface with time, create an ongoing effect or lock in ecosystem. It will fade off.
Social media also has the need for accessibility thus paid models won't scale to billion dollar monsters.
I have some hope for new social media platforms with non compulsory subscription option providing extra perks than the free one to run.
I remember getting a vibe from diggnation before v4 launches that twitter and Facebook were taking off and digg wasn’t. There was pownce or something that was a twitterbe and the redesign tried to be what the huge socia media sites were. But that wasn’t what was cool about digg. Digg was a cleaner fark, but they wanted to be Twitter.
[+] [-] sys_64738|6 years ago|reply
The moral here is don't change anything. Ever.
[+] [-] awb|6 years ago|reply
I read an interview with the PlentyOfFish founder and he alluded to this.
People would ask him why his site looked so bad compared to other dating sites. He said he he was afraid trying to make it better would make it worse. In reality he didn't know why people liked his site so much but it was working.
So he ended up working a couple hours each morning checking for spam and paying bills and took the rest of the day off instead of trying to constantly "improve" the site.
[+] [-] lethain|6 years ago|reply
[0]: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
[+] [-] blihp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robgibbons|6 years ago|reply
One specific example of this is The Other Side of the Wind, by Orson Welles, in which Welles noted the existence of this magic phenomenon and deliberately sought to make a film centrally driven by happenstance and unscripted ad-libs. In other words: trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
[+] [-] thejosh|6 years ago|reply
Didn't really need it in my life anyway.
[+] [-] bagacrap|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zouhair|6 years ago|reply
You can see this for successful small family restaurants, they usually don't have a lot of choices and usually do little things very well and stick with them and can last for generations.
[+] [-] anovikov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celticmusic|6 years ago|reply
Heroes is a great example. The first seasons was amazing, the 2nd season was hot garbage. They had no idea what made the first season so great.
[+] [-] processing|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zyang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elfexec|6 years ago|reply
The only reason they left was because there was an alternative - reddit. If reddit wasn't around, digg would have a captive audience and they would be as big as reddit today. Reddit now has the same problem with power users + corporate/news/think tank/political party affiliated subreddit mods with heavy censorship. Fortunately for reddit, there really is no alternative. Also the same thing with youtube. People complain about censorship and mainstream corporate nonsense being peddled on reddit, youtube, etc, but they have nowhere to go.
If digg had waited a few years til reddit folded or they had a secure monopolistic position, they would be relevant today. Digg made the same mistake myspace did, piss off their users with a viable competitor around. And once the migration started, it was over.
[+] [-] badfrog|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ankut04|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaushikb9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aantix|6 years ago|reply
>leaders who doesn’t explicitly refuse to move forward,
>pressure will converge on you from all sides: investors, the
>team wanting to return to stable employment, and the non-
>participating leadership team who all want you to commit so
>they can move on to new things for themselves.
That's not pressure, that's leverage. Demand a better deal and let them know you're prepared to walk and sink the ship.
[+] [-] redis_mlc|6 years ago|reply
Yup, when Pixar went public, Jobs decided to keep 100% of the shares. (You could argue that he deserved it, since he spent the majority of his fortune on Pixar and Next.)
So his 4 top managers threatened to quit and derail the IPO.
So they got shares, but no other employees did.
[+] [-] ProAm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toxican|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rb808|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franciscop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jm4|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtmail|6 years ago|reply
Digg currently, or recently, was down to 200 daily active users? I knew they lost a lot of users but that sounds like they lost everybody.
[+] [-] lethain|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikepurvis|6 years ago|reply
I don't know if spez and kn0thing had some special insight about this, but my experience with it over the long term has been that you can be subbed to a few reddits for your preferred niche interests, and enjoy almost complete isolation from whatever toxicity is going on over in r/politics or wherever else (barring the occasional bit of brigading, which is basically just a mess for the smaller-community mods to clean up).
So there's clearly a large number of mainline users who basically just read whatever reddits are default on the logged-out homepage. But I think there's also a super long tail of users who don't read those at all, and my hunch is that it's that long tail of users who have probably sustained the site over the long term, and will continue to give it a lot of resiliency going forward.
[+] [-] eshyong|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hi5eyes|6 years ago|reply
every community in the history the internet falls to eternal september at some point
[+] [-] busymom0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jandrese|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toohotatopic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcinzm|6 years ago|reply
I'm guessing it's because tech is a small-ish world and no acquiring company wants to burn bridges (with the VCs) by doing that.
[+] [-] rbanffy|6 years ago|reply
Also, a loyal and cohesive team can do the "we go together or we don't go" move.
[+] [-] caseyf7|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SethMurphy|6 years ago|reply
https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-acquires-digg/
At the time Digg was acquired in name only. The team had a short period to replace the then current (and very expensive) infrastructure and hijack all traffic. They did a pretty awesome tech job of moving to AWS and stopping the bleeding from the then in place bare metal setup. I remember a tech talk where they spoke of the money they saved from moving to AWS, it was substantial and allowed them the resources to try to save the product. Since then it was a re-birthed startup with a new team that had quite a long runway IMHO.
[+] [-] mattbillenstein|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stazz1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redis_mlc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Angostura|6 years ago|reply
A little Googling suggests that they were collaborations. But I wonder if the data scientists were also involved
http://v1.stamen.com/clients/digg.html http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=585
[+] [-] prepend|6 years ago|reply
I think these two “data scientists” were probably called webmaster or sysadmin and it took them coming in the next morning and grepping the log files. Or looking at google analytics which existed at the time. I don’t remember if real-time was free in 2010, but it could easily tell referrals and passthroughs.
[+] [-] thought_alarm|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thrwaway69|6 years ago|reply
I think social media sites benefit from short term squeeze due to most of them being driven by influence, trends, and generation which dies off after a while. Unless you can retain and acquire users by switching interface with time, create an ongoing effect or lock in ecosystem. It will fade off.
Social media also has the need for accessibility thus paid models won't scale to billion dollar monsters.
I have some hope for new social media platforms with non compulsory subscription option providing extra perks than the free one to run.
Example - Discord
[+] [-] prepend|6 years ago|reply