Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues.
I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.
Digg was Digg, then V4 launched, and it was no longer Digg. It was really that simple, oh hey I should check Digg maybe there is something interesting went to oh hey I need to find something else to check because Digg is stale, the new UI had much lower information density, coupled with less content meant that there was no reason to go back if you could find a faster feed.
New stuff like reddit, insta, twitter, simply took over filling the urge to hit f5 for latest content.
Yeah, the technical issues weren't that crazy from the user perspective. The change of features were though.
It was a totally different site, people left because the core functionality of the site disappeared over night.
Edit - makes me wonder if they used the site themselves.
It’s interesting that as users, we think of v4 as this pivotal moment when the platform changed forever - but the article’s author seems to think of it more as the inflection point of ongoing problems that had built up for a while.
Especially with a high profile implosion like this, it’s really interesting to contrast our experience in the userbase to an internal perspective.
>Digg V4 is sometimes referenced as an example of a catastrophic launch, with an implied lesson that we shouldn’t have launched it. At one point, I used to agree, but these days I think we made the right decision to launch. Our traffic was significantly down, we were losing a bunch of money each month, we had recently raised money and knew we couldn’t easily raise more. If we’d had the choice between launching something great and something awful, we’d have preferred to launch something great, but instead we had the choice of taking one last swing or turning in our bat quietly.
That's my recollection of it. Just one day the content was not interesting anymore and felt certainly more gamed than before, which they wanted to combat as per this blog post.
I'm surprised the conclusion is not that they learn to never do a full rewrite of a social product again.
Glad to see this as the top comment. I was a "Digg refugee" to Reddit, and I do remember a lot of outages with V4, but just like you, I remember thinking more clearly "Why would I wait a long time for this page to load when all that comes back is spam." It was the most useless, uninteresting set of basically ads that I could think of. Imagine if Reddit had no interesting user submitted stories but was instead 100% of some of their worst ads that try to use "Reddit meme language". It was pathetic and sad.
I remember a growing frustration before the v4 launch. Early on it seemed to be an aggregator for fun stuff on the internet, but over time it become more and more political. The v4 launch was the last straw that convinced me to switch to Reddit.
Reddit at the time felt lighthearted and fun. I think I read somewhere that a lot of the comments were being written in-house, which makes sense in retrospect. For example, someone would leave a comment like "Is this the real life?", and then the entire lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody would appear line-by-line as comments without missing a beat. It seems improbable that a bunch of strangers could have done that perfectly.
While there are some parallels between Digg v4 and what's going on with Reddit today, I think predictions of its death are greatly exaggerated. However, I would be happy to see something else take its place.
This is why I’m excited for the Reddit third party apps change.
In a few years nobody will remember that this is what precipitated the fall of Reddit. It’s already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.
Even the smaller subs catch the contagion year over year.
I’ve been a Redditor since before the narwhal baconed at midnight. I miss the Reddit that was good.
I remember Kevin Rose talking about the impending V4 and being struck by how obsessed he was with Digg doing every popular web trend at the time. He was particularly focused on everything Facebook did to the point where Digg aesthetically started to even look like Facebook. It seemed like Digg had all but abandoned what made it great in pursuit of copying others. Maybe this was VC pressure, who knows.
> Our API server was a Python Tornado service... and one of the most frequently accessed endpoint was used to retrieve user by their name or id. Because it supported retrieval by either name or id, it set default values for both parameters as empty lists. This is a super reasonable thing to do! However, Python only initializes default parameters when the function is first evaluated, which means that the same list is used for every call to the function. As a result, if you mutate those values, the mutations span across invocations.
How on earth did such a well-known Python footgun ever make it into production? This is the kind of thing that should leap out of the screen for even a mid-level Python developer - and once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot.
Sure it's a known footgun, but I wouldn't be so harsh without knowing more. It could be the result of a series of only slightly bad decisions.
A junior developer creates a function with default of [] instead of (), but otherwise no mutations:
def get_user(unchecked_ids=[]):
ids = get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids)
if not ids: ids = [current_user_id]
return query_users(ids)
Alice introduces a mutation in a place that is currently safe.
fa55099 - 45 minutes ago - Alice - Avoid creating unnecessary new list
def get_user(unchecked_ids=[]):
ids = get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids)
- if not ids: ids = [current_user_id]
+ if not ids: ids.append(current_user_id)
return query_users(ids)
Meanwhile Bob simplifies the code in a separate branch.
f4e704c - 30 minutes ago - Bob - Fix caller who was sending invalid ids
+ def get_user(ids=[]):
- def get_user(unchecked_ids=[]):
- ids = get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids)
if not ids: ids = [current_user_id]
return query_users(ids)
Then Charlie does something else on the branch, tries to merge it into master, and Git auto-resolves the conflict because there's no overlap between the changes.
def get_user(ids=[]):
if not ids: ids.append(current_user_id)
return query_users(ids)
And now everyone sees the data of a random user, and your foot is missing.
Is it good code? No. Good version control hygiene? Also no. Should you crucify the developer who made this mistake? Of course not, especially once you add the boilerplate chaff that was omitted here. That's why it's called a footgun, it's easy to misuse.
Humans aren't perfect. Open source projects have missed unescaped spaces in directory paths that caused the deletion of /usr (Bumblebee), video games have forgotten to check the cwd and deleted vital windows boot files (Eve Online) and operating systems have forgotten to check passwords (MacOS).
Given this was 2010 I wouldn't be surprised if they had a less mature development process that doesn't use things people take for granted today, like linters, and pre-merge code reviews.
If you assume perfection of humans, maybe 95/100 times it works out and 4/100 it's a small oops, but 1/100 times you get something embarrassing like this
Having done this same mistake myself, it's just such an easy mistake to make. Most likely you're writing two or three programming languages in the same project, and the others work differently from Python. So it's very easy to miss an errant `foo={}` in a function definition when reviewing a commit of several hundred lines. Especially as the only indicator of something being wrong is the lowest priority warning PyCharm has, meaning the background colour `{}` is only slightly different.
These days I'd set up a linter that enforces these things do not happen, but it's easy to be smart after the fact. You say "once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot", which I feel is true. You just need that bitter experience first, and for me it came in the form of a production issue.
It feels like they had someone developing this service that hasn’t done this kind of thing before. Which is a pretty startupy thing to do. I’ve been there before, even with that exact footgun. Though a much smaller feature and testing revealed it.
Original Digg was what reddit is now. And Reddit was what Hacker news is now. But luckily I cant see a mass migration here from reddit. I cant even see a reddit replacement. Discord is the platform of choice for discussion these days. Most users will either drift off there or find alternative single issue forums to replace what they were viewing on Reddit. This is one of the places i'll come to but I'll see if I can find other communitities with a decent level of activity as well.
I remember when hacker news would shut down signups during reddit outages to prevent the mass migration lol. Great move IMO. I don't think they do that any more. Probably because reddit doesn't have nearly as much downtime as in the old days.
I was really hoping there would be an analysis of why the v4 was needed from a revenue point of view. The v4 essentially winked the company because no one likes the UX/UI. Digg insisted on it. Interestingly years later, Reddit followed the same route. They moved to the exact same UI that I hated with digg. Luckily they kept the older UI which is what kept me with the site. I am yet to get an answer about why the redesign was necessary and what it would give them they couldn’t get with the old design
Digg was more or less dead before the v4 launch. They were already losing a flood of users to reddit and other social media networks (facebook and twitter were going though the roof). They had massive issues with voting rings manipulating their algorithm and selling access to their front page. And when new front page spots weren't bought, they were almost always just posts that had reached the front page of reddit several hours earlier.
This post also mentions an update to google search which hit them hard, and a bunch of internal issues, senior staff leaving. They had a limited runway and the company was going to run out of money unless they did something.
The something they decided to do was "launch digg v4". It wasn't ready from a technical perspective. Worse, it really looks like they skipped the market research step used their once chance to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what worked.
While the UI was part of it, a big reason people didn't like it was that corporations had their own accounts and were posting directly in the feeds. That's something that integrated into reddit Reddit a number of years ago, first as ads and now also directly in subreddits, and even longer if you count AMAs or obvious astroturfing.
Tangentially related, just yesterday a rideshare company got into hot water for posting support on reddit where they used the persons real name instead of their username.
I seem to recall that, years ago, this article's photo[1] of Digg engineers sitting together for the v4 launch used to get posted every now and then. Usually, the idea was to shock people about how awful open offices were. Only today did I learn that this was a photo of an unusual event, and not how people usually sat at Digg.
That is the room where all of the eng team worked, but certainly not how it looked on a normal day. If you look, you can spot three clusters of 4 desks around the edges of the room in this picture. There were ~10 clusters of similar size that scattered around a large open space.
The worst part about that room was not the open feeling, but rather the silver walls and ceiling
A year or two prior to this, they were also putting linked sites into iframes, with the "digg bar" on top. So they had managed to alienate not just their users, but also the site owners that all the content linked to.
That can actually be quite useful, if implemented correctly. Even as a site owner I wouldn't mind, because it lets users upvote my content after reading it easily. But evolving browser standards killed it and most of the time it was implemented annoyingly.
Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little inconspicuous indicator in the toolbar that lets you vote or comment on the origin site easily.
I have been through several full rewrites of major money makers. It’s almost always a really bad idea. Almost being the key word.
Beyond second system syndrome, you really have no idea what your users actually like about your product vs your competitors. You’re too close to the product.
A rewrite that breaks users muscle memory and frustrates them is the perfect time for a jump to a competitor.
You are basically always better off mutating over time at a much more tolerable rate.
By the way, thanks for sharing the video. It took me back to a simpler era, two guys drinking and talking about the issues they had to overcome. We now take these social media for granted, but back then some of those problems were too knew for those guys.
Coincidentally, I've been going through Digg's history including v4 and their early history, because it's nostalgic for me.
What people don't realize is Digg actually had four founders, depending on how you count them. Owen Byrne[0] has as his bio "The person who built digg for $1000 @ $10/hour, lol". Going by that, I don't think he shared in any equity.
The whole site was bootstrapped for apparently $6000 total.
People also think Digg turned down Google's $200 million offer, but it was the other way around. Google walked away after some due diligence.
Knowing all this, Digg's fall seems kind of inevitable. That said Reddit never really filled that hole IMO.
I wasn't a Digg founder, but I worked with them from the earliest days on Digg until its downfall.
The real story is probably way more interesting than anyone really would guess. I'll summarise it as so:
What made Digg work really was one guy who was a machine. He would vet all the stories, infiltrate all the SEO networks, and basically keep subverting them to keep the Digg front-page usable. Digg had an algorithm, but it was basically just a simple algorithm that helped this one dude 10x his productivity and keep the quality up.
Google came to buy Digg, but figured out that really it's just a dude who works 22 hours a day that keeps the quality up, and all that talk of an algorithm was smoke and mirrors to trick the SEO guys into thinking it was something they could game (they could not, which is why front page was so high quality for so many years). Google walked.
Then the founders realised if they ever wanted to get any serious money out of this thing, they had to fix that. So they developed "real algorithms" that independently attempted to do what this one dude was doing, to surface good/interesting content.
They thought they'd succeeded, or market pressures forced their hand, whatever. So they rolled it along with a catastrophic UI/UX and back-end tech rewrite all rolled up into one.
It was a total shit-show. I was involved in the "old" MySQL stack, and watched them totally fuck it up with beta software that wasn't ready for production (Cassandra, at the time, was not what it is today).
The algorithm to figure out what's cool and what isn't wasn't as good as the dude who worked 22 hours a day, and without his very heavy input, it just basically rehashed all the shit that was popular somewhere else a few days earlier.
So you ended up with a site that was ugly, fuxed, no-one in the existing wanted, and with a bland boring bunch of stories on the front-page, which was not at all compelling for anyone new showing up to check stuff out.
Instead of taking this massive slap to the face constructively, the founders doubled-down. And now here we are.
To be clear, much of the tech behind Digg was very interesting, the work Owen and many other engineers did was very interesting. The algorithm was all smoke and mirrors, though. And Kevin and his little circle of buddies were all crap engineers that tanked the business with their hubris and inexperience.
When I was 13, I managed to watch TechTV for one straight day while on vacation. Then, TechTV promptly shut down. But learning about Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, changed me. I wanted to move to San Francisco and get into tech. TWiT and Diggnation were totally foundational to me.
I remember still the excitement that on Digg you could upvote a story without reloading a page. AJAX! That was really what Web 2.0 was about, technologically.
I sometimes feel strange that almost no one talks about these days. Maybe it’s not long enough ago? I mean… it’s been almost 20 years.
techbros had the lesson of their life, and learned nothing.
still can't relate the failure of adding incremental value and foatering community... defends to again spending all the time on a full rewrite that wasn't even load tested.
the sad part is that the whole team did have success! most of them went to be leaders elsewhere spreading their cancerous big-and-bust with their layoff cycles.
techbro privilege is real. maybe similar to the political class. no other professions allow such reckless failures.
I was an avid user of Digg. I remember having to force myself not to spend too much time on the site. I enjoyed the content. Always interesting stuff was posted. I also enjoyed the funny comments. I remember the epic downvotes. The Dumbledore comments. The Photoshop comments. The DVD key comments. Lots of fun.
My memory of what happened was this. There was some infighting about the comment threads and how they should be implemented. A new approach got implemented. The site started crawling any time you clicked on a comment. Everyone was saying that of course it wasn’t going to work and a particular person’s approach shouldn’t have been used. The site became unusable. After that it became a blur, because I must have stopped using the site. I believe the downfall of Digg occurred around these changes.
There was an internal alpha build of Digg v4 that had "verticals", which were kinda like subreddits. If there weren't enough stories to fill up the front page, the backend would run a search query and fill in relevant stories from other verticals, or even external search engines. As a vertical got more users, the user-voted stories would be given priority over the algorithmically chosen ones.
From a user perspective, this meant that there was already a subreddit for any topic you could conceive of, even if nobody had ever submitted a story to it. It was pretty magical.
Sadly, this whole system was axed in order to get the thing launched before we ran out of money. I bet you could do an even better version of it now with recommendations based on LLM prompts.
Albeit unpopular opinion, this kind of things is one of the reasons why I'll always push for Java instead of a jigsaw of different languages that sound cool.
Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly.
Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple.
I think its probably fair to say that we as individual developers are always going to push for the thing we are most familiar and comfortable with. Almost nothing is "complicated" or "bloated" if you are really productive with it and know all the pain points to avoid. My experience with Java is that the language is great, but the ecosystem and tooling is where the bloat and complexity comes in. If I were really accustomed to this ecosystem then I probably wouldn't hold this opinion.
Digg didn't fail because it didn't use Java, that's preposterous. Java isn't more scalable, stable or simple than any other solution, that's Java consultancy bullshit.
Digg v4 failed because the user experience was basically equal to if when someone forgets to renew their domain, and a squatter put up some BS spam site in its place.
There was no place for users on Digg v4. And without users, it's hard to get revenue.
Was it unreliable at first? I didn't even notice. I just saw what they were aiming for, and noped out.
I still read Digg, along with HN, Reddit, slashdot, metafilter, lobste.rs, kottke, boing boing and many other sources of news and links. I’ve always been an information junkie. High brow, low brow, I don’t care. I want it all.
Sorry if it's too much to ask, but would you mind posting a list of your common sources? I'm familiar with everything you've posted, I'm always looking for new sites.
That is/was tech culture, but also the cost of catering an event like this is not that high. Maybe a couple thousand dollars to boost morale? It probably cost the same as a couple of MacBooks or office chairs and those are consolidated costs to individual employees. The catering is divided by everyone.
People comparing this to reddit today and anticipating a downfall to a new flashy competitor are in for a rude awakening. A huge portion of the country believes in "hate speech" and "election misinformation" as a major issue in the country.
If the original reddit were introduced today with the exact same owners (RIP Aaron), rules, and layout, they'd be cut off by AWS, their IP provider, called Nazi's on CNN, etc.
On top of that, it's clear a site such as Reddit pushes their political viewpoints forward. Why would they give up such power for a more "balanced" and "fair" site. Look what happened in 2016 when the DNC leaks occurred and Trump stuff was on the frontpage day and night.
Personally I hope this does happen and would LOVE to see a few things defaulted in the new reddit.
1) Allow viewing of removed comments.
2) Give mods the ability to remove upvotes in comments (for a more OG message board vibe)
3) A different type of view for a political post. Maybe instead of just seeing the best comment, you'd get the ability to see the top comment + top rebuttal or something.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
deergomoo|2 years ago
I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.
what-the-grump|2 years ago
New stuff like reddit, insta, twitter, simply took over filling the urge to hit f5 for latest content.
Seanambers|2 years ago
Edit - makes me wonder if they used the site themselves.
mustacheemperor|2 years ago
Especially with a high profile implosion like this, it’s really interesting to contrast our experience in the userbase to an internal perspective.
>Digg V4 is sometimes referenced as an example of a catastrophic launch, with an implied lesson that we shouldn’t have launched it. At one point, I used to agree, but these days I think we made the right decision to launch. Our traffic was significantly down, we were losing a bunch of money each month, we had recently raised money and knew we couldn’t easily raise more. If we’d had the choice between launching something great and something awful, we’d have preferred to launch something great, but instead we had the choice of taking one last swing or turning in our bat quietly.
conradfr|2 years ago
I'm surprised the conclusion is not that they learn to never do a full rewrite of a social product again.
hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago
thisismyhna|2 years ago
patwolf|2 years ago
Reddit at the time felt lighthearted and fun. I think I read somewhere that a lot of the comments were being written in-house, which makes sense in retrospect. For example, someone would leave a comment like "Is this the real life?", and then the entire lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody would appear line-by-line as comments without missing a beat. It seems improbable that a bunch of strangers could have done that perfectly.
While there are some parallels between Digg v4 and what's going on with Reddit today, I think predictions of its death are greatly exaggerated. However, I would be happy to see something else take its place.
unsupp0rted|2 years ago
In a few years nobody will remember that this is what precipitated the fall of Reddit. It’s already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.
Even the smaller subs catch the contagion year over year.
I’ve been a Redditor since before the narwhal baconed at midnight. I miss the Reddit that was good.
I’m excited to see what replaces it.
swalsh|2 years ago
kolanos|2 years ago
Dwedit|2 years ago
biorach|2 years ago
How on earth did such a well-known Python footgun ever make it into production? This is the kind of thing that should leap out of the screen for even a mid-level Python developer - and once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot.
BoppreH|2 years ago
A junior developer creates a function with default of [] instead of (), but otherwise no mutations:
Alice introduces a mutation in a place that is currently safe. Meanwhile Bob simplifies the code in a separate branch. Then Charlie does something else on the branch, tries to merge it into master, and Git auto-resolves the conflict because there's no overlap between the changes. And now everyone sees the data of a random user, and your foot is missing.Is it good code? No. Good version control hygiene? Also no. Should you crucify the developer who made this mistake? Of course not, especially once you add the boilerplate chaff that was omitted here. That's why it's called a footgun, it's easy to misuse.
Macha|2 years ago
Given this was 2010 I wouldn't be surprised if they had a less mature development process that doesn't use things people take for granted today, like linters, and pre-merge code reviews.
If you assume perfection of humans, maybe 95/100 times it works out and 4/100 it's a small oops, but 1/100 times you get something embarrassing like this
Ndymium|2 years ago
These days I'd set up a linter that enforces these things do not happen, but it's easy to be smart after the fact. You say "once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot", which I feel is true. You just need that bitter experience first, and for me it came in the form of a production issue.
ohgodplsno|2 years ago
Waterluvian|2 years ago
mrguyorama|2 years ago
I've been bitten by this exact thing. It's not strictly obvious IMO. Though it didn't make it through testing.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
paulddraper|2 years ago
drumhead|2 years ago
skizm|2 years ago
nitia|2 years ago
yalogin|2 years ago
phire|2 years ago
This post also mentions an update to google search which hit them hard, and a bunch of internal issues, senior staff leaving. They had a limited runway and the company was going to run out of money unless they did something.
The something they decided to do was "launch digg v4". It wasn't ready from a technical perspective. Worse, it really looks like they skipped the market research step used their once chance to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what worked.
biorach|2 years ago
Revenue. Well, that's what they hoped.
At the expense of user experience.
Enshittification, but without the lock-in, which ended predictably
tomstockmail|2 years ago
Tangentially related, just yesterday a rideshare company got into hot water for posting support on reddit where they used the persons real name instead of their username.
dmazin|2 years ago
Or maybe I'm thinking of a different photo?
[1] https://lethain.com/static/blog/heroes/digg-v4.jpg
sfrench|2 years ago
The worst part about that room was not the open feeling, but rather the silver walls and ceiling
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
tyingq|2 years ago
captainmuon|2 years ago
Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little inconspicuous indicator in the toolbar that lets you vote or comment on the origin site easily.
donatj|2 years ago
Beyond second system syndrome, you really have no idea what your users actually like about your product vs your competitors. You’re too close to the product.
A rewrite that breaks users muscle memory and frustrates them is the perfect time for a jump to a competitor.
You are basically always better off mutating over time at a much more tolerable rate.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
runlevel1|2 years ago
IIRC, it was a bunch of Penguin Computing boxes in an Equinix DC in San Jose. I think we probably retired the last of them in early 2015.
HaZeust|2 years ago
shortlived|2 years ago
That's terrifying!
neom|2 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNBcIPSROs
geenat|2 years ago
Digg was 3 webservers with 8 database slaves in 2006.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060412174457/http://www.oreill...
Digg even moved some processing from MySQL into PHP in 2009 to increase performance.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/23/digg-4000-performa...
frou_dh|2 years ago
mr90210|2 years ago
Given how many users they have I suppose they know a thing or two about scale.
mr90210|2 years ago
Andrex|2 years ago
What people don't realize is Digg actually had four founders, depending on how you count them. Owen Byrne[0] has as his bio "The person who built digg for $1000 @ $10/hour, lol". Going by that, I don't think he shared in any equity.
The whole site was bootstrapped for apparently $6000 total.
People also think Digg turned down Google's $200 million offer, but it was the other way around. Google walked away after some due diligence.
Knowing all this, Digg's fall seems kind of inevitable. That said Reddit never really filled that hole IMO.
0. https://twitter.com/owenbyrne
philovivero|2 years ago
The real story is probably way more interesting than anyone really would guess. I'll summarise it as so:
What made Digg work really was one guy who was a machine. He would vet all the stories, infiltrate all the SEO networks, and basically keep subverting them to keep the Digg front-page usable. Digg had an algorithm, but it was basically just a simple algorithm that helped this one dude 10x his productivity and keep the quality up.
Google came to buy Digg, but figured out that really it's just a dude who works 22 hours a day that keeps the quality up, and all that talk of an algorithm was smoke and mirrors to trick the SEO guys into thinking it was something they could game (they could not, which is why front page was so high quality for so many years). Google walked.
Then the founders realised if they ever wanted to get any serious money out of this thing, they had to fix that. So they developed "real algorithms" that independently attempted to do what this one dude was doing, to surface good/interesting content.
They thought they'd succeeded, or market pressures forced their hand, whatever. So they rolled it along with a catastrophic UI/UX and back-end tech rewrite all rolled up into one.
It was a total shit-show. I was involved in the "old" MySQL stack, and watched them totally fuck it up with beta software that wasn't ready for production (Cassandra, at the time, was not what it is today).
The algorithm to figure out what's cool and what isn't wasn't as good as the dude who worked 22 hours a day, and without his very heavy input, it just basically rehashed all the shit that was popular somewhere else a few days earlier.
So you ended up with a site that was ugly, fuxed, no-one in the existing wanted, and with a bland boring bunch of stories on the front-page, which was not at all compelling for anyone new showing up to check stuff out.
Instead of taking this massive slap to the face constructively, the founders doubled-down. And now here we are.
To be clear, much of the tech behind Digg was very interesting, the work Owen and many other engineers did was very interesting. The algorithm was all smoke and mirrors, though. And Kevin and his little circle of buddies were all crap engineers that tanked the business with their hubris and inexperience.
ojbyrne|2 years ago
dmazin|2 years ago
When I was 13, I managed to watch TechTV for one straight day while on vacation. Then, TechTV promptly shut down. But learning about Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, changed me. I wanted to move to San Francisco and get into tech. TWiT and Diggnation were totally foundational to me.
I remember still the excitement that on Digg you could upvote a story without reloading a page. AJAX! That was really what Web 2.0 was about, technologically.
I sometimes feel strange that almost no one talks about these days. Maybe it’s not long enough ago? I mean… it’s been almost 20 years.
ndjdhdidve|2 years ago
still can't relate the failure of adding incremental value and foatering community... defends to again spending all the time on a full rewrite that wasn't even load tested.
the sad part is that the whole team did have success! most of them went to be leaders elsewhere spreading their cancerous big-and-bust with their layoff cycles.
techbro privilege is real. maybe similar to the political class. no other professions allow such reckless failures.
iJohnDoe|2 years ago
My memory of what happened was this. There was some infighting about the comment threads and how they should be implemented. A new approach got implemented. The site started crawling any time you clicked on a comment. Everyone was saying that of course it wasn’t going to work and a particular person’s approach shouldn’t have been used. The site became unusable. After that it became a blur, because I must have stopped using the site. I believe the downfall of Digg occurred around these changes.
I would be curious of other people’s timeline.
synack|2 years ago
From a user perspective, this meant that there was already a subreddit for any topic you could conceive of, even if nobody had ever submitted a story to it. It was pretty magical.
Sadly, this whole system was axed in order to get the thing launched before we ran out of money. I bet you could do an even better version of it now with recommendations based on LLM prompts.
thih9|2 years ago
nunobrito|2 years ago
Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly.
Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple.
Too bad for Digg. Was a good site.
biorach|2 years ago
swalsh|2 years ago
geenat|2 years ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20060412174457/http://www.oreill...
Digg even moved some processing from MySQL into PHP in 2009 to increase performance.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/23/digg-4000-performa...
tazjin|2 years ago
jtms|2 years ago
darkstar_16|2 years ago
dimgl|2 years ago
These are not the adjectives I associate with Java...
throw_m239339|2 years ago
knorker|2 years ago
There was no place for users on Digg v4. And without users, it's hard to get revenue.
Was it unreliable at first? I didn't even notice. I just saw what they were aiming for, and noped out.
cainxinth|2 years ago
IanKerr|2 years ago
marban|2 years ago
EdwardDiego|2 years ago
esprehn|2 years ago
HeckFeck|2 years ago
TheCaptain4815|2 years ago
If the original reddit were introduced today with the exact same owners (RIP Aaron), rules, and layout, they'd be cut off by AWS, their IP provider, called Nazi's on CNN, etc.
On top of that, it's clear a site such as Reddit pushes their political viewpoints forward. Why would they give up such power for a more "balanced" and "fair" site. Look what happened in 2016 when the DNC leaks occurred and Trump stuff was on the frontpage day and night.
Personally I hope this does happen and would LOVE to see a few things defaulted in the new reddit.
1) Allow viewing of removed comments. 2) Give mods the ability to remove upvotes in comments (for a more OG message board vibe) 3) A different type of view for a political post. Maybe instead of just seeing the best comment, you'd get the ability to see the top comment + top rebuttal or something.