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"All it needed to do was..." I stopped reading right there. Hindsight is 20/20 and this kind of talk really trivializes how difficult it is to successfully ex

"All it needed to do was..." I stopped reading right there. Hindsight is 20/20 and this kind of talk really trivializes how difficult it is to successfully execute - especially over an evolving landscape of 6 years.

ojbyrne 16y ago
I stopped reading at "OK, I'm going to call it." As if the writer is so prescient that after several techcrunch columns saying digg is dead, wow, he had an epiphany - digg is dead! I have to tell everyone, so they'll be impressed by my keen insight! Of course this was the whole point of digg in the first place, to "democratize the media" because the media seems to be a bunch of braying donkeys who follow the lead ass wherever he wants to go. So in a sense this story really is saying digg is dead. If you actually read it and feel that's its useful, that is.
aamar 16y ago
I find a lot of good insight in this article (despite the classically linkbait title). Absolutely, execution is difficult; there a ton of difficult problems to solve on a site like this, e.g.: How can the system allow noobs to participate and advance without incentivizing sock-puppets? Are voting circles good (increasing participation) or bad (decreasing honest assessment/diversity of content)? No site is going to get it all right, but I think it's both appropriate and useful to periodically assess: what are some of the Digg solutions that didn't turn out to work as well as alternate solutions? On a few points, the article doesn't persuade me, including the claim that a twitter-like mostly-personalized homepage beats a community-wide homepage: maybe yes, maybe no. But several other strategies adopted by Digg do seem to be problematic over the long-term, and kudos to the author for highlighting a bunch of relevant ones. Bigger kudos to reddit for pretty consistently adopting smart solutions to these same problems.
GrantS 16y ago
"All it needed to do was get rid of the universal front page in favor of Twitter- and Facebook-like individual front pages, where everyone has a different front page based on who he or she is following." If I recall correctly, this was one of several features they introduced in late 2010 that caused a mass exodus of users. Suddenly, my front page was mostly empty and unchanging since I had largely ignored Digg's friend system. You could optionally load the "universal front page" but the community seemed to have died overnight -- the top stories went from having 400 comments to 10 comments, most of which were "Where did everybody go?"

ojbyrne 16y ago

I stopped reading at "OK, I'm going to call it." As if the writer is so prescient that after several techcrunch columns saying digg is dead, wow, he had an epiphany - digg is dead! I have to tell everyone, so they'll be impressed by my keen insight! Of course this was the whole point of digg in the first place, to "democratize the media" because the media seems to be a bunch of braying donkeys who follow the lead ass wherever he wants to go. So in a sense this story really is saying digg is dead. If you actually read it and feel that's its useful, that is.

aamar 16y ago

I find a lot of good insight in this article (despite the classically linkbait title). Absolutely, execution is difficult; there a ton of difficult problems to solve on a site like this, e.g.: How can the system allow noobs to participate and advance without incentivizing sock-puppets? Are voting circles good (increasing participation) or bad (decreasing honest assessment/diversity of content)? No site is going to get it all right, but I think it's both appropriate and useful to periodically assess: what are some of the Digg solutions that didn't turn out to work as well as alternate solutions? On a few points, the article doesn't persuade me, including the claim that a twitter-like mostly-personalized homepage beats a community-wide homepage: maybe yes, maybe no. But several other strategies adopted by Digg do seem to be problematic over the long-term, and kudos to the author for highlighting a bunch of relevant ones. Bigger kudos to reddit for pretty consistently adopting smart solutions to these same problems.

GrantS 16y ago

"All it needed to do was get rid of the universal front page in favor of Twitter- and Facebook-like individual front pages, where everyone has a different front page based on who he or she is following." If I recall correctly, this was one of several features they introduced in late 2010 that caused a mass exodus of users. Suddenly, my front page was mostly empty and unchanging since I had largely ignored Digg's friend system. You could optionally load the "universal front page" but the community seemed to have died overnight -- the top stories went from having 400 comments to 10 comments, most of which were "Where did everybody go?"