11 ms·

How the Digg team was acquihired

187 points by stuartmemo 7y ago

mtmail 7y ago
> our starting point was far less: 200 DAU. 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 7y ago
  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.
sys_64738 7y ago
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. The moral here is don't change anything. Ever.
- lethain 7y ago
  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. [0]: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
  - sys_64738 7y ago
    But did Digg serve its purpose for that period of the internet? That is, is it simply the case that Digg had limited shelf life and should have been left alone to die out naturally. If it was losing numbers then maybe the redesign or whatever it was accelerated its demise. Sometimes it's better to use the iPod effect as momentum to launch then next new thing (iPhone). That new thing is totally separate from the old thing (Digg).
    - taurath 7y ago
      If you take investor money and start to fail, you aren't gonna die out naturally, you'll be killed and drained of blood, or die attempting a triple pirouette off a 200 meter high dive into a kiddy pool.
      - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        That doesn't seem to have happened here. Digg isn't popular, and I'd definitely stipulate that it's lower quality, but it still exists and functions as a general interest content aggregator thing.
        taurath 7y ago
        Just because a website is up doesn't mean its relevant
        marcinzm 7y ago
        As I understand, Digg the original company was killed and drained of blood. The company that acquired the rights to digg.com as a result then re-launched it. The original Digg, the company, is long dead and buried.
        war1025 7y ago
        New Digg is a resurrection of old Digg by a completely different company. [1] The Digg v4 thing was a very big deal back when it happened. In a matter of a month or two, Digg lost the majority of its traffic to Reddit. I personally remember switching pretty much overnight after v4 when beforehand I always thought Reddit was inferior to Digg. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Sale_and_relaunch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Sale_and_relaunch Edit: Found an old graph of the traffic dropoff when v4 launched [2] [2] http://i.imgur.com/FuqV9.png http://i.imgur.com/FuqV9.png
  - mooted1 7y ago
    I think it's tempting to attribute to structure what can be better explained by accident. You obviously have more context, but from my experience developing product, there are almost always ways to change direction incrementally and in a manner that allows you to get your toe wet to test the temperature, and not dive in unshielded. Although I realize now you may be saying that change was inevitable, but catastrophe wasn't.
  - random314 7y ago
    Google Panda launched in 2011. Digg V4 launched in 2010. This seems to contradict the timeline in your post?
- thejosh 7y ago
  And reddit is doing the new thing. Their new design caused me to leave, even their "old." subdomain is pretty bad. Didn't really need it in my life anyway.
  - doc_gunthrop 7y ago
    But old.reddit.com is the same as reddit before they implemented the bloated redesign.
    - takeda 7y ago
      it constantly tries to make you to the new page. I actually have an extension to keep me on old.reddit.com. TBH I really miss Usenet. That functionality is what essentially I'm trying to get from them.
      - atombender 7y ago
        It's an account setting -- you can completely opt out of the new version. I use Reddit every day, and have never been sent to the new version by mistake. Unfortunately, if you use the old version, you will also not have access to the newest mod tools, including a lot of sub settings. But the old version works fine for reading and commenting.
        bauerd 7y ago
        The old version works fine, if you're aware of these workarounds, and these workarounds will not be shut down I for one don't have an account, so I would get nagged by their popups constantly. It was a perfectly fine website, they ruined it completely for me.
        dredmorbius 7y ago
        I've set my preference to old numerous times. That setting seems to either revert or disappear entirely / appear as a new setting. I'm constantly directed to www. That's obvious as I've disabled JS for the domain, and so get an empty page with a spinner. It's a clusterfsck.
- everdev 7y ago
  > 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.
  - somehnguy 7y ago
    The lack of wanting to improve the site really shows. Of all the dating sites I've tried POF is by far the worst, nearly ever user I've had contact with was a spam bot. It's totally useless.
  - nojvek 7y ago
    Digg looked great. Even original digg looked way nicer than current reddit. The problem was big redesign. They really fucked it up. Ads were being shoved left and right without knowing what really was an ad and what wasn’t. It’s the same fuckery reddit started doing and scaled a bit back. I still hate current reddit (all the pop ups are really annoying) Moral of the story: don’t do massive redesigns. Listen to your customers (not your VCs). Change one small thing at a time, A/B test it, UX interview it with customers, then roll it more % of customers. if no red flags, increase % over time to 100%.
    - OGWhales 7y ago
      Oh man, I really dislike the new reddit. It's slower and wastes half the screen real estate. Why did they think it was good? Seriously a bummer, as you know the old design is gonna be phased out at one point or another.
    - j-james 7y ago
      The classic example of a redesign done right is with eBay. eBay's background used to be a (very) bright yellow, which looked pretty bad even for the web in 2009. When they initially changed it to the current white, the designers received enough complaints to change it back for fear of loosing parts of their userbase. They still wanted to change the background to pave the way for other websites, so slowly, over several months, they lightened the shade of yellow until it became white. [a] This concept has been applied by many other "big" websites - Amazon, Dell, Google, and Yahoo come up as examples. [b] [a]: https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience [b]: https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/ https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/
- bagacrap 7y ago
  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.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  I feel this way about a lot of television shows. 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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - bjelkeman-again 7y ago
    The second season was really puzzling.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Heroes was damage from the writers' strike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_the_2007%E2%80%9308_Writers_Guild_of_America_strike_on_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_the_2007%E2%80%9308_...
- blihp 7y ago
  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.
  - granshaw 7y ago
    Yes, this is the standard (and often correct) refrain - but think about it from the founders perspective: He risks 0 of his own funds to have a shot at getting rich and never having to work again; he gets the excitement of growing a company to grapple with giants and take over markets; and even if he fails, the name recognition he obtained during the journey ensures he'll have his pick of lucrative future gigs. THAT's why so few tech lifestyle businesses stay that size, and it's all very logical really.
- robgibbons 7y ago
  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.
  - toyg 7y ago
    The original Star Wars is the classic example of that phenomenon. It often happens in music too, when artists with different sensibilities somehow “clash” and the material they produce together (which they’ll inevitably think of as “full of compromises” etc etc) is superior to anything they would produce individually, before or after.
    - danjac 7y ago
      Another example is Jaws: the mechanical shark didn't work very well, so Spielberg had to rely on the human characters and dialogue, a fin above the water, shark-eye-view shots, and John Williams' classic score. Based on what little we saw of the actual prop, the result elevated the film above what might have easily been a laughable B-movie.
      - shantly 7y ago
        Man, that movie is great, and yeah, it's entirely because it's about the people more than the shark.
  - truculent 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
- anovikov 7y ago
  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".
- zouhair 7y ago
  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.
echelon 7y ago
Does anyone see the same fate happening to Reddit? Or are they too big and too entrenched at this point?
- eshyong 7y ago
  Probably the latter. Once you have that big a userbase + not much competition it's hard to go down unless something catastrophic happens.
  - busymom0 7y ago
    One could say the same about FB too though but I think FB is dying/dead. Only reason they are relevant is because of their acquisitions - IG, Whatsapp and messenger and people using FB login for sites. As a content platform, I don't think that many people use FB anymore.
    - skinnymuch 7y ago
      FB still makes the majority of its huge amounts of revenue and profit from FB. Messenger and Whatsapp currently do almost nothing financially.
      - busymom0 7y ago
        I don't have Whatsapp but I do have messenger. Messenger shows me ads and I would even say they are more effective than the ads on FB. Does FB disclose how much they make in ads from individual sources?
- hi5eyes 7y ago
  a lot of early reddit came from digg every community in the history the internet falls to eternal september at some point
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  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.
redis_mlc 7y ago
I'd like to know more about why a failing news site had 2 data scientists on the payroll.
- Angostura 7y ago
  I remember Digg Labs produced some really cool animated real-time visualisations of stories on the site. 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://v1.stamen.com/clients/digg.html http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=585 http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=585
  - synack 7y ago
    No, the Stamen work happened before we had any data scientists on payroll. Edit: We did have an R&D team that did things that might today be considered data science, but at the time they were mostly focused on documenting and optimizing the Digg "algorithm"
- prepend 7y ago
  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.
thought_alarm 7y ago
Do we know who the leads were behind the catastrophic Digg redesign/reimplementation, because those clowns should be tarred and feathered and should never work in the software industry again. Reddit's gone down the same path. Who's leading that effort?
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  $$$ + short term squeeze. 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 7y ago
  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.
aantix 7y ago
>Because acquihires are “star” oriented, if you’re a senior >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 7y ago
  > that's leverage. 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.
  - aantix 7y ago
    Totally the right move. I’ve been through an acquisition. Everyone is jockeying for position and if you’re not, unless you’re really good friends with the founder, you will be exploited. As an engineer, they want you to stay on to increase the value of the deal. If you’re a star on the team, they absolutely need you to stay on for the deal to go through. All of those extra hours, nights, weekends, that made you the go-to dev, pays off with this piece of leverage. Use it. Say it loudly that you’re willing to sink the deal for everyone else impress your demands are met. If they let you go, you never had any leverage to begin with. But if they listen closely to your demands, you’re right where you should be. Do not think for a second that any of the founders, managers or other devs have your best interests in mind.
processing 7y ago
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.
- zyang 7y ago
  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.
  - CoughlinJ 7y ago
    Reddit solved nothing. As far as I know there's little-to-no transparency in each subreddits moderation or content approval process. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is a glaring issue with that platform.
    - eps 7y ago
      You don't like a sub, you don't sub to the sub. The frontpage you see is the one that you compose yourself, that's the thing what makes reddit work.
      - Traster 7y ago
        This isn't true for a number of reasons. Firstly, the existence of a sub-reddit on a topic makes it almost impossible for a different sub-reddit for the same subject to gain traction. So, sure you can disagree with how /r/politics or /r/motorcycles moderates their subs, but the result is you don't get to read about motorcycles or US politics on reddit. The barrier to creating an alternative is almost infinitely high. I'm struggling to think of any sub-reddits that have been replaced by alternatives on the same subject. So you end up with a tiny number of redditors who are the moderators for the largest sub-reddits. There is practically no turn over in these people, they have functionally complete autonomy over the vast majority of the traffic on the site, and they quite literally can choose to ban individual websites. What makes you think that companies were paying for digg power users to be friendly but the exact same class of users at reddit aren't getting the same treatment? And in reality, what the majority of people see on the frontpage is the frontpage filled with the default sub-reddits. Which, again, are entirely at the discretion of handful of moderators who have 0 accountability.
ProAm 7y ago
It's funny because Im now back to checking out DIgg daily. I find it much more enjoyable than Reddit these days.
- toxican 7y ago
  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.
- rb808 7y ago
  Often it seems Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Google News, FB, even local newspapers are just are recycling the same content.
  - ProAm 7y ago
    This is because no one pays for journalism anymore.
badfrog 7y ago
What's the benefit for an average software engineer in going along with the acquihire rather than looking for a completely new job?
- prepend 7y ago
  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.
  - shantly 7y ago
    Mine was a Friday "hey we got bought, it was just enough to pay off our debts basically so no your stock is not worth anything, the good news is you're all hired by the acquiring company so show up at X on Monday for your new job, have a nice weekend!" so of course I showed up at X, signed their shitty employment contract, did whatever they asked, and spent the rest of the time reading novels in my terminal and finding another job that wasn't a huge open-floorplan low-wall-cube office hellhole.
- ankut04 7y ago
  Benefits are for the founders. For employees, its just another day. No need to go for job hunting immediately.
  - justinator 7y ago
    Well just another day, perhaps with a different corporate culture that you may not fit well in. So that's another minus for employees.
  - Traster 7y ago
    It's almost never going to be just another day. For a start, the acquiring company is almost certainly going to immediately stuff fucking with your benefits. Your projects are incredibly unlikely to survive- so if you care about what you're working on, forget it. If your project does survive be ready for a massive influx of new people all of whom have their own ideas of why the acquisition happened and what your project was for. Oh and because acquihires almost always happen where the acquiring company is a behemoth you're going to subsumed into a massive bureaucracy that is clearly not what you signed up for in your original job.
caseyf7 7y ago
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.
- SethMurphy 7y ago
  Yes, the fall of the original Digg happened long ago. https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-acquires-digg/ 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.
  - panpanna 7y ago
    Clicked on your link... that Verizon Media privacy page is a nightmare. And then it fails to load the article... Do you have any more information about the move to aws and why that was cheaper than their old setup?
mattbillenstein 7y ago
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.
toohotatopic 7y ago
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?
- rbanffy 7y ago
  Non-competes, probably, are the easy way. Accusing the potential acquirer of acting in bad faith also happens. Also, a loyal and cohesive team can do the "we go together or we don't go" move.
  - toohotatopic 7y ago
    I am not fully convinced. That cohesive team, why would it make money for the old company and its investors? That signing bonus can be split entirely among themselves. Non-competes are not allowed in California. And in any other location, the team can wait it out because the company most likely ceases existing.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  >Why does the new company not approach the lead engineer and the selected employees directly? 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.
franciscop 7y ago
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?
- jm4 7y ago
  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.
stazz1 7y ago
Can you even submit to Digg anymore? The basic functionality is broken and it's unclear why the site is floundering? Are you serious?

187 points by stuartmemo 7y ago

> our starting point was far less: 200 DAU. 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 7y ago
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.

sys_64738 7y ago

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. The moral here is don't change anything. Ever.

lethain 7y ago
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. [0]: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
- sys_64738 7y ago
  But did Digg serve its purpose for that period of the internet? That is, is it simply the case that Digg had limited shelf life and should have been left alone to die out naturally. If it was losing numbers then maybe the redesign or whatever it was accelerated its demise. Sometimes it's better to use the iPod effect as momentum to launch then next new thing (iPhone). That new thing is totally separate from the old thing (Digg).
  - taurath 7y ago
    If you take investor money and start to fail, you aren't gonna die out naturally, you'll be killed and drained of blood, or die attempting a triple pirouette off a 200 meter high dive into a kiddy pool.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      That doesn't seem to have happened here. Digg isn't popular, and I'd definitely stipulate that it's lower quality, but it still exists and functions as a general interest content aggregator thing.
      - taurath 7y ago
        Just because a website is up doesn't mean its relevant
      - marcinzm 7y ago
        As I understand, Digg the original company was killed and drained of blood. The company that acquired the rights to digg.com as a result then re-launched it. The original Digg, the company, is long dead and buried.
      - war1025 7y ago
        New Digg is a resurrection of old Digg by a completely different company. [1] The Digg v4 thing was a very big deal back when it happened. In a matter of a month or two, Digg lost the majority of its traffic to Reddit. I personally remember switching pretty much overnight after v4 when beforehand I always thought Reddit was inferior to Digg. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Sale_and_relaunch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Sale_and_relaunch Edit: Found an old graph of the traffic dropoff when v4 launched [2] [2] http://i.imgur.com/FuqV9.png http://i.imgur.com/FuqV9.png
- mooted1 7y ago
  I think it's tempting to attribute to structure what can be better explained by accident. You obviously have more context, but from my experience developing product, there are almost always ways to change direction incrementally and in a manner that allows you to get your toe wet to test the temperature, and not dive in unshielded. Although I realize now you may be saying that change was inevitable, but catastrophe wasn't.
- random314 7y ago
  Google Panda launched in 2011. Digg V4 launched in 2010. This seems to contradict the timeline in your post?
thejosh 7y ago
And reddit is doing the new thing. Their new design caused me to leave, even their "old." subdomain is pretty bad. Didn't really need it in my life anyway.
- doc_gunthrop 7y ago
  But old.reddit.com is the same as reddit before they implemented the bloated redesign.
  - takeda 7y ago
    it constantly tries to make you to the new page. I actually have an extension to keep me on old.reddit.com. TBH I really miss Usenet. That functionality is what essentially I'm trying to get from them.
    - atombender 7y ago
      It's an account setting -- you can completely opt out of the new version. I use Reddit every day, and have never been sent to the new version by mistake. Unfortunately, if you use the old version, you will also not have access to the newest mod tools, including a lot of sub settings. But the old version works fine for reading and commenting.
      - bauerd 7y ago
        The old version works fine, if you're aware of these workarounds, and these workarounds will not be shut down I for one don't have an account, so I would get nagged by their popups constantly. It was a perfectly fine website, they ruined it completely for me.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        I've set my preference to old numerous times. That setting seems to either revert or disappear entirely / appear as a new setting. I'm constantly directed to www. That's obvious as I've disabled JS for the domain, and so get an empty page with a spinner. It's a clusterfsck.
everdev 7y ago
> 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.
- somehnguy 7y ago
  The lack of wanting to improve the site really shows. Of all the dating sites I've tried POF is by far the worst, nearly ever user I've had contact with was a spam bot. It's totally useless.
- nojvek 7y ago
  Digg looked great. Even original digg looked way nicer than current reddit. The problem was big redesign. They really fucked it up. Ads were being shoved left and right without knowing what really was an ad and what wasn’t. It’s the same fuckery reddit started doing and scaled a bit back. I still hate current reddit (all the pop ups are really annoying) Moral of the story: don’t do massive redesigns. Listen to your customers (not your VCs). Change one small thing at a time, A/B test it, UX interview it with customers, then roll it more % of customers. if no red flags, increase % over time to 100%.
  - OGWhales 7y ago
    Oh man, I really dislike the new reddit. It's slower and wastes half the screen real estate. Why did they think it was good? Seriously a bummer, as you know the old design is gonna be phased out at one point or another.
  - j-james 7y ago
    The classic example of a redesign done right is with eBay. eBay's background used to be a (very) bright yellow, which looked pretty bad even for the web in 2009. When they initially changed it to the current white, the designers received enough complaints to change it back for fear of loosing parts of their userbase. They still wanted to change the background to pave the way for other websites, so slowly, over several months, they lightened the shade of yellow until it became white. [a] This concept has been applied by many other "big" websites - Amazon, Dell, Google, and Yahoo come up as examples. [b] [a]: https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience [b]: https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/ https://articles.uie.com/death_of_relaunch/
bagacrap 7y ago
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.
celticmusic 7y ago
I feel this way about a lot of television shows. 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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bjelkeman-again 7y ago
  The second season was really puzzling.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Heroes was damage from the writers' strike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_the_2007%E2%80%9308_Writers_Guild_of_America_strike_on_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_the_2007%E2%80%9308_...
blihp 7y ago
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.
- granshaw 7y ago
  Yes, this is the standard (and often correct) refrain - but think about it from the founders perspective: He risks 0 of his own funds to have a shot at getting rich and never having to work again; he gets the excitement of growing a company to grapple with giants and take over markets; and even if he fails, the name recognition he obtained during the journey ensures he'll have his pick of lucrative future gigs. THAT's why so few tech lifestyle businesses stay that size, and it's all very logical really.
robgibbons 7y ago
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.
- toyg 7y ago
  The original Star Wars is the classic example of that phenomenon. It often happens in music too, when artists with different sensibilities somehow “clash” and the material they produce together (which they’ll inevitably think of as “full of compromises” etc etc) is superior to anything they would produce individually, before or after.
  - danjac 7y ago
    Another example is Jaws: the mechanical shark didn't work very well, so Spielberg had to rely on the human characters and dialogue, a fin above the water, shark-eye-view shots, and John Williams' classic score. Based on what little we saw of the actual prop, the result elevated the film above what might have easily been a laughable B-movie.
    - shantly 7y ago
      Man, that movie is great, and yeah, it's entirely because it's about the people more than the shark.
- truculent 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
anovikov 7y ago
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".
zouhair 7y ago
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.

echelon 7y ago

Does anyone see the same fate happening to Reddit? Or are they too big and too entrenched at this point?

eshyong 7y ago
Probably the latter. Once you have that big a userbase + not much competition it's hard to go down unless something catastrophic happens.
- busymom0 7y ago
  One could say the same about FB too though but I think FB is dying/dead. Only reason they are relevant is because of their acquisitions - IG, Whatsapp and messenger and people using FB login for sites. As a content platform, I don't think that many people use FB anymore.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    FB still makes the majority of its huge amounts of revenue and profit from FB. Messenger and Whatsapp currently do almost nothing financially.
    - busymom0 7y ago
      I don't have Whatsapp but I do have messenger. Messenger shows me ads and I would even say they are more effective than the ads on FB. Does FB disclose how much they make in ads from individual sources?
hi5eyes 7y ago
a lot of early reddit came from digg every community in the history the internet falls to eternal september at some point
mikepurvis 7y ago
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.

redis_mlc 7y ago

I'd like to know more about why a failing news site had 2 data scientists on the payroll.

Angostura 7y ago
I remember Digg Labs produced some really cool animated real-time visualisations of stories on the site. 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://v1.stamen.com/clients/digg.html http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=585 http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=585
- synack 7y ago
  No, the Stamen work happened before we had any data scientists on payroll. Edit: We did have an R&D team that did things that might today be considered data science, but at the time they were mostly focused on documenting and optimizing the Digg "algorithm"
prepend 7y ago
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.

thought_alarm 7y ago

Do we know who the leads were behind the catastrophic Digg redesign/reimplementation, because those clowns should be tarred and feathered and should never work in the software industry again. Reddit's gone down the same path. Who's leading that effort?

thrwaway69 7y ago
$$$ + short term squeeze. 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 7y ago
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.

aantix 7y ago

>Because acquihires are “star” oriented, if you’re a senior >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 7y ago
> that's leverage. 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.
- aantix 7y ago
  Totally the right move. I’ve been through an acquisition. Everyone is jockeying for position and if you’re not, unless you’re really good friends with the founder, you will be exploited. As an engineer, they want you to stay on to increase the value of the deal. If you’re a star on the team, they absolutely need you to stay on for the deal to go through. All of those extra hours, nights, weekends, that made you the go-to dev, pays off with this piece of leverage. Use it. Say it loudly that you’re willing to sink the deal for everyone else impress your demands are met. If they let you go, you never had any leverage to begin with. But if they listen closely to your demands, you’re right where you should be. Do not think for a second that any of the founders, managers or other devs have your best interests in mind.

processing 7y ago

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.

zyang 7y ago
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.
- CoughlinJ 7y ago
  Reddit solved nothing. As far as I know there's little-to-no transparency in each subreddits moderation or content approval process. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is a glaring issue with that platform.
  - eps 7y ago
    You don't like a sub, you don't sub to the sub. The frontpage you see is the one that you compose yourself, that's the thing what makes reddit work.
    - Traster 7y ago
      This isn't true for a number of reasons. Firstly, the existence of a sub-reddit on a topic makes it almost impossible for a different sub-reddit for the same subject to gain traction. So, sure you can disagree with how /r/politics or /r/motorcycles moderates their subs, but the result is you don't get to read about motorcycles or US politics on reddit. The barrier to creating an alternative is almost infinitely high. I'm struggling to think of any sub-reddits that have been replaced by alternatives on the same subject. So you end up with a tiny number of redditors who are the moderators for the largest sub-reddits. There is practically no turn over in these people, they have functionally complete autonomy over the vast majority of the traffic on the site, and they quite literally can choose to ban individual websites. What makes you think that companies were paying for digg power users to be friendly but the exact same class of users at reddit aren't getting the same treatment? And in reality, what the majority of people see on the frontpage is the frontpage filled with the default sub-reddits. Which, again, are entirely at the discretion of handful of moderators who have 0 accountability.

ProAm 7y ago

It's funny because Im now back to checking out DIgg daily. I find it much more enjoyable than Reddit these days.

toxican 7y ago
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.
rb808 7y ago
Often it seems Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Google News, FB, even local newspapers are just are recycling the same content.
- ProAm 7y ago
  This is because no one pays for journalism anymore.

badfrog 7y ago

What's the benefit for an average software engineer in going along with the acquihire rather than looking for a completely new job?

prepend 7y ago
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.
- shantly 7y ago
  Mine was a Friday "hey we got bought, it was just enough to pay off our debts basically so no your stock is not worth anything, the good news is you're all hired by the acquiring company so show up at X on Monday for your new job, have a nice weekend!" so of course I showed up at X, signed their shitty employment contract, did whatever they asked, and spent the rest of the time reading novels in my terminal and finding another job that wasn't a huge open-floorplan low-wall-cube office hellhole.
ankut04 7y ago
Benefits are for the founders. For employees, its just another day. No need to go for job hunting immediately.
- justinator 7y ago
  Well just another day, perhaps with a different corporate culture that you may not fit well in. So that's another minus for employees.
- Traster 7y ago
  It's almost never going to be just another day. For a start, the acquiring company is almost certainly going to immediately stuff fucking with your benefits. Your projects are incredibly unlikely to survive- so if you care about what you're working on, forget it. If your project does survive be ready for a massive influx of new people all of whom have their own ideas of why the acquisition happened and what your project was for. Oh and because acquihires almost always happen where the acquiring company is a behemoth you're going to subsumed into a massive bureaucracy that is clearly not what you signed up for in your original job.

caseyf7 7y ago

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.

SethMurphy 7y ago
Yes, the fall of the original Digg happened long ago. https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-acquires-digg/ 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.
- panpanna 7y ago
  Clicked on your link... that Verizon Media privacy page is a nightmare. And then it fails to load the article... Do you have any more information about the move to aws and why that was cheaper than their old setup?

mattbillenstein 7y ago

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.

toohotatopic 7y ago

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?

rbanffy 7y ago
Non-competes, probably, are the easy way. Accusing the potential acquirer of acting in bad faith also happens. Also, a loyal and cohesive team can do the "we go together or we don't go" move.
- toohotatopic 7y ago
  I am not fully convinced. That cohesive team, why would it make money for the old company and its investors? That signing bonus can be split entirely among themselves. Non-competes are not allowed in California. And in any other location, the team can wait it out because the company most likely ceases existing.
marcinzm 7y ago
>Why does the new company not approach the lead engineer and the selected employees directly? 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.

franciscop 7y ago

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?

jm4 7y ago
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.

stazz1 7y ago

Can you even submit to Digg anymore? The basic functionality is broken and it's unclear why the site is floundering? Are you serious?