5 ms·

Digg Makes a Play for Relevance, Increases Front Page Speed 75%

29 points by jdrucker 16y ago

PaulHoule 16y ago
It doesn't matter how fast it loads or updates if it reads like a bizzaro-world version of the headlines of the magazines at the supermarket checkout.
SolarUpNote 16y ago
Wow, they finally took my advice and changed their layout back! :P
- rsoto 16y ago
  Yours and the world's as well. I don't care how fast they claim to be now-- whether if it's true or not. reddit is down at the moment and I've been reloading like crazy for about 2 hours. I think there's a lesson to learn there.
  - codexon 16y ago
    Reddit has always had way more downtime than digg for as long as I can remember. People left digg for reddit because of power users and the last straw of serving as an RSS feed for big name websites. If they have the brains to go back on these 2 changes and maintain the same uptime, there's absolutely no reason why they would not be able to surpass reddit again. Reddit is not without its share of problems: - frequent downtime - censorship and squatting of subreddits - censorship of random subreddits like atheism - shadow banning of random articles
    - redthrowaway 16y ago
      What makes you think there's any real censorship? Mods are free to censor whatever they feel like. When people get sick of it, they form a new community. See the /r/marijuana to /r/trees migration that occurred a while back for the most famous example. Shadowbanning from the site is really only done by hueypriest. If a mod shadowbans you, post elsewhere. As far as downtime, they have three engineers. One programmer, and two sysadmins. Raldi just left for Google. Three engineers for 1.1 billion pageviews. Give them a break.
      - codexon 16y ago
        - What makes you think there's any real censorship? See the atheism debacle. They tweaked the "algorithm" until it stopped showing up in the top 10 (requirement for frontpage). Try submitting an anti-haskell article in proggit. It will never show up. - Shadowbanning from the site is really only done by hueypriest. If a mod shadowbans you, post elsewhere. Post elsewhere? The difference between the front page and a random unknown subreddit is 20k or 10 viewers. Articles can be "shadowbanned" because of their faulty anti-spam system. The main problem with shadowbanning is that people don't even know it is shadow banned until they start digging, so good stories get stuck in limbo. - As far as downtime, they have three engineers. One programmer, and two sysadmins. Raldi just left for Google. Three engineers for 1.1 billion pageviews. Give them a break. They had uptime problems far before 1.1 billion pageviews. Read the The Mythical Man-Month. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month. 3 engineers is more than enough for this type of website. If it isn't, then they should've stopped adding features.
        redthrowaway 16y ago
        >3 engineers is more than enough for this type of website. Sorry, but you lost all credibility right there.
zaidf 16y ago
Digg is like that once-cool friend who goes all weird overnight leaving his buddies wondering 'WTF happened?'.
JakeSteele 16y ago
is it just me, or after they changed the layout, 90% of the users left for reddit, so it would make much more sense if the speed boost would've been 1000%?
- fossuser 16y ago
  At that point they didn't have any users worth keeping anyway. The community had degraded to the point of irrelevance a year or two before the redesign. If anything the shift to reddit just harmed reddit.
  - ajarmoniuk 16y ago
    Happily, subreddits help alleviate this 'content inflation'.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  They aren't talking about latency, they're talking about how quickly stories reach the front page and how long they stay there.
clistctrl 16y ago
I love the example Reddit has made with the Digg/Reddit war. Mostly in that it was never a war. I remember hearing their response when they found out about digg was something to the affect of "oh interesting" then continued on.
- nopassrecover 16y ago
  Digg was popular well before Reddit, and I was always given the impression that Reddit was established as an ultimately successful Digg competitor. However, your statement prompted me to do a little research. Here is Alexis' (reddit) story: "This is a good chance for me to dispel any rumors. We were living in a veil of ignorance for the first month or so at Reddit. We were working our asses off, my co-founder Steve Huffman and I, building a site that we got online, and then two weeks into the site being online we found out that there was this other site called Digg, that had venture funding and it had been out for quite some time." Source: http://mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-was-built-with-alexis-ohanian/ http://mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-wa...
  - edw 16y ago
    From the perspective of a programmer-slash-reader back in '05, I think the progression was that you discovered Digg and used it until you heard about Reddit, which had much fewer stupid stories that were much more tech focused than Digg's, so you ditched Digg and started reading Reddit until three out of four stories were about either peak oil, Ron Paul, why America sucked, or Obama. You suffered through that for a while until Hacker News came along, and then you stopped going to Reddit. I've actually started reading Slashdot again in the last year of so, which is funny, because it's growing irrelevance is what drove me to Digg in the first place.
  - kloncks 16y ago
    With all due respect, I really don't buy that story. I'm a fan of Digg and Alexis. Paul Carr said it best: "So at best they did zero research before they launched Reddit into a space that kinda relies on the founders knowing where to find cool new stuff online."
kunjaan 16y ago
The front page was pretty fast, but I keep getting a weird error that won't let me proceed to the next page. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/317805/digg.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/317805/digg.png
unohoo 16y ago
who cares ?
Dramatize 16y ago
BTW he is talking about the frequency new articles appear - not page load speed.
- lwat 16y ago
  So he's twitterizing Digg? I guess it could work.
citricsquid 16y ago
I'm probably bias as I really dislike the whole "social media" thing going on with the internet right now (the sort of crap mashable covers) but I see this as proof that "social media" is a fad and that real communities which have been around since the dawn of the internet are where the real growth and stability is. Reddit is a community, always has been, it took time to grow but it has grown and is now flourishing, Digg is a social media site, where the focus is not on discussion or sharing cool things, it's about driving page views to other sites, the discussion and sharing links became a side part of it.
protomyth 16y ago
Did I just miss it or is there no actual link to digg in the article? I expect that crud out of the newspaper sites, but it seems odd there.

29 points by jdrucker 16y ago

It doesn't matter how fast it loads or updates if it reads like a bizzaro-world version of the headlines of the magazines at the supermarket checkout.

SolarUpNote 16y ago

Wow, they finally took my advice and changed their layout back! :P

rsoto 16y ago
Yours and the world's as well. I don't care how fast they claim to be now-- whether if it's true or not. reddit is down at the moment and I've been reloading like crazy for about 2 hours. I think there's a lesson to learn there.
- codexon 16y ago
  Reddit has always had way more downtime than digg for as long as I can remember. People left digg for reddit because of power users and the last straw of serving as an RSS feed for big name websites. If they have the brains to go back on these 2 changes and maintain the same uptime, there's absolutely no reason why they would not be able to surpass reddit again. Reddit is not without its share of problems: - frequent downtime - censorship and squatting of subreddits - censorship of random subreddits like atheism - shadow banning of random articles
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    What makes you think there's any real censorship? Mods are free to censor whatever they feel like. When people get sick of it, they form a new community. See the /r/marijuana to /r/trees migration that occurred a while back for the most famous example. Shadowbanning from the site is really only done by hueypriest. If a mod shadowbans you, post elsewhere. As far as downtime, they have three engineers. One programmer, and two sysadmins. Raldi just left for Google. Three engineers for 1.1 billion pageviews. Give them a break.
    - codexon 16y ago
      - What makes you think there's any real censorship? See the atheism debacle. They tweaked the "algorithm" until it stopped showing up in the top 10 (requirement for frontpage). Try submitting an anti-haskell article in proggit. It will never show up. - Shadowbanning from the site is really only done by hueypriest. If a mod shadowbans you, post elsewhere. Post elsewhere? The difference between the front page and a random unknown subreddit is 20k or 10 viewers. Articles can be "shadowbanned" because of their faulty anti-spam system. The main problem with shadowbanning is that people don't even know it is shadow banned until they start digging, so good stories get stuck in limbo. - As far as downtime, they have three engineers. One programmer, and two sysadmins. Raldi just left for Google. Three engineers for 1.1 billion pageviews. Give them a break. They had uptime problems far before 1.1 billion pageviews. Read the The Mythical Man-Month. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month. 3 engineers is more than enough for this type of website. If it isn't, then they should've stopped adding features.
      - redthrowaway 16y ago
        >3 engineers is more than enough for this type of website. Sorry, but you lost all credibility right there.

zaidf 16y ago

Digg is like that once-cool friend who goes all weird overnight leaving his buddies wondering 'WTF happened?'.

JakeSteele 16y ago

is it just me, or after they changed the layout, 90% of the users left for reddit, so it would make much more sense if the speed boost would've been 1000%?

fossuser 16y ago
At that point they didn't have any users worth keeping anyway. The community had degraded to the point of irrelevance a year or two before the redesign. If anything the shift to reddit just harmed reddit.
- ajarmoniuk 16y ago
  Happily, subreddits help alleviate this 'content inflation'.
redthrowaway 16y ago
They aren't talking about latency, they're talking about how quickly stories reach the front page and how long they stay there.

clistctrl 16y ago

I love the example Reddit has made with the Digg/Reddit war. Mostly in that it was never a war. I remember hearing their response when they found out about digg was something to the affect of "oh interesting" then continued on.

nopassrecover 16y ago
Digg was popular well before Reddit, and I was always given the impression that Reddit was established as an ultimately successful Digg competitor. However, your statement prompted me to do a little research. Here is Alexis' (reddit) story: "This is a good chance for me to dispel any rumors. We were living in a veil of ignorance for the first month or so at Reddit. We were working our asses off, my co-founder Steve Huffman and I, building a site that we got online, and then two weeks into the site being online we found out that there was this other site called Digg, that had venture funding and it had been out for quite some time." Source: http://mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-was-built-with-alexis-ohanian/ http://mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-wa...
- edw 16y ago
  From the perspective of a programmer-slash-reader back in '05, I think the progression was that you discovered Digg and used it until you heard about Reddit, which had much fewer stupid stories that were much more tech focused than Digg's, so you ditched Digg and started reading Reddit until three out of four stories were about either peak oil, Ron Paul, why America sucked, or Obama. You suffered through that for a while until Hacker News came along, and then you stopped going to Reddit. I've actually started reading Slashdot again in the last year of so, which is funny, because it's growing irrelevance is what drove me to Digg in the first place.
- kloncks 16y ago
  With all due respect, I really don't buy that story. I'm a fan of Digg and Alexis. Paul Carr said it best: "So at best they did zero research before they launched Reddit into a space that kinda relies on the founders knowing where to find cool new stuff online."

kunjaan 16y ago

The front page was pretty fast, but I keep getting a weird error that won't let me proceed to the next page. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/317805/digg.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/317805/digg.png

unohoo 16y ago

who cares ?

Dramatize 16y ago

BTW he is talking about the frequency new articles appear - not page load speed.

lwat 16y ago
So he's twitterizing Digg? I guess it could work.

citricsquid 16y ago

I'm probably bias as I really dislike the whole "social media" thing going on with the internet right now (the sort of crap mashable covers) but I see this as proof that "social media" is a fad and that real communities which have been around since the dawn of the internet are where the real growth and stability is. Reddit is a community, always has been, it took time to grow but it has grown and is now flourishing, Digg is a social media site, where the focus is not on discussion or sharing cool things, it's about driving page views to other sites, the discussion and sharing links became a side part of it.

protomyth 16y ago

Did I just miss it or is there no actual link to digg in the article? I expect that crud out of the newspaper sites, but it seems odd there.