15 ms·

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 i

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.

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.