26 ms·

Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

246 points by jamescun 3y ago

dmazin 3y ago
I seem to recall that, years ago, this article's photo[1] of Digg engineers sitting together for the v4 launch used to get posted every now and then. Usually, the idea was to shock people about how awful open offices were. Only today did I learn that this was a photo of an unusual event, and not how people usually sat at Digg. Or maybe I'm thinking of a different photo? [1] https://lethain.com/static/blog/heroes/digg-v4.jpg https://lethain.com/static/blog/heroes/digg-v4.jpg
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sfrench 3y ago
  That is the room where all of the eng team worked, but certainly not how it looked on a normal day. If you look, you can spot three clusters of 4 desks around the edges of the room in this picture. There were ~10 clusters of similar size that scattered around a large open space. The worst part about that room was not the open feeling, but rather the silver walls and ceiling
biorach 3y ago
> Our API server was a Python Tornado service... and one of the most frequently accessed endpoint was used to retrieve user by their name or id. Because it supported retrieval by either name or id, it set default values for both parameters as empty lists. This is a super reasonable thing to do! However, Python only initializes default parameters when the function is first evaluated, which means that the same list is used for every call to the function. As a result, if you mutate those values, the mutations span across invocations. How on earth did such a well-known Python footgun ever make it into production? This is the kind of thing that should leap out of the screen for even a mid-level Python developer - and once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot.
- Macha 3y ago
  Humans aren't perfect. Open source projects have missed unescaped spaces in directory paths that caused the deletion of /usr (Bumblebee), video games have forgotten to check the cwd and deleted vital windows boot files (Eve Online) and operating systems have forgotten to check passwords (MacOS). Given this was 2010 I wouldn't be surprised if they had a less mature development process that doesn't use things people take for granted today, like linters, and pre-merge code reviews. If you assume perfection of humans, maybe 95/100 times it works out and 4/100 it's a small oops, but 1/100 times you get something embarrassing like this
  - belter 3y ago
    Completely disagree with the aproach humans are not perfect. This was not a one opportunity only event. Every test case they did not run, every load simulation they did not perform, every chaos test they decided to overlook was an example of humans failing repeatedly. Massive websites were running since the early nineties...And robust software practices are a thing of the sixties.
    - WJW 3y ago
      Agreed, but this was not a solid company in the first place. Rather, Digg was (according to TFA) a failing startup losing money hand over fist that was launching v4 as a hail mary. They were so hard up that no hardware was available for hosting the new environment, so they started reusing v3 servers for v4 while the migration was ongoing. They bet it all on this v4 thing, and lost.
      - dronf23 3y ago
        Funny you should mention that there was no hardware available. Digg had a second cage full of servers in VA as part of a failed attempt to go multi-DC. If that project had ever worked out there would have been 50% more capacity. Those servers and network gear just sat there unused until they finally got liquidated for pennies on the dollar.
  - 3y ago
EdwardDiego 3y ago
Waiters? ...really?
- esprehn 3y ago
  That is/was tech culture, but also the cost of catering an event like this is not that high. Maybe a couple thousand dollars to boost morale? It probably cost the same as a couple of MacBooks or office chairs and those are consolidated costs to individual employees. The catering is divided by everyone.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  When you're truly in the zone, even walking for food or booze is too much effort.
neom 3y ago
Kevin Rose: We migrated from LAMP to Cassandra because LAMP doesn't scale and Cassandra does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNBcIPSROs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNBcIPSROs
- mr90210 3y ago
  Hasn’t Facebook moved away from LAMP because of… scale? Given how many users they have I suppose they know a thing or two about scale.
  - neom 3y ago
    Facebook made Cassandra specifically because of this. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshman-ladis2009.pdf https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshma...
    - esprehn 3y ago
      Later Facebook stopped using Cassandra though, and continues to use MySQL.
      - dmazin 3y ago
        MySQL backed, in turn, by a log structured storage engine (RocksDB). But the they reason they do that is storage space efficiency rather than availability or performance.
    - swalsh 3y ago
      There was a period around 2010 where developers all declared sql dead, and started playing with nosql solutions. My personal experience at the time was, most people didn't have Facebook's scaling problems, and they created terrible tech debts as a result. Eventually most people remembered why SQL was so great, and they added Redis if they needed a cache. The Ruby people though still liked those NoSQL stuff, and I'll never understand them.
shortlived 3y ago
> We had so little capacity that we had decided to reimage all our existing servers and then reprovision them in the new software stack. That's terrifying!
nunobrito 3y ago
Albeit unpopular opinion, this kind of things is one of the reasons why I'll always push for Java instead of a jigsaw of different languages that sound cool. Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly. Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple. Too bad for Digg. Was a good site.
- darkstar_16 3y ago
  That's not a function of Java.
- biorach 3y ago
  It's pretty clear from the article that the issues Digg had were not caused by choice of language.
  - nunobrito 3y ago
    They literally complain about python bad choices of libraries.
    - biorach 3y ago
      In that article? I'm not seeing that.
      - nunobrito 3y ago
        Yeah. Not really my fault there.
        stavros 3y ago
        The word "libraries" is not even mentioned in the code. Python is only mentioned to detail a bug that caused a memory leak, I don't know how you generalized this to "Python is to blame for Digg's demise" but that's not anyone else's fault.
deergomoo 3y ago
Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues. I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.
- conradfr 3y ago
  That's my recollection of it. Just one day the content was not interesting anymore and felt certainly more gamed than before, which they wanted to combat as per this blog post. I'm surprised the conclusion is not that they learn to never do a full rewrite of a social product again.
  - broknbottle 3y ago
    This so much. I remember visiting digg after v4 launch and it felt like a totally different site. At the time I remember looking for site that filled void and offered similar content but wasn’t so focused e.g. slashdot and I came upon reddit
- thisismyhna 3y ago
  Yeap, this was definitely the point where many of us jumped over to Reddit. I remember hating Reddit's interface but it was the lesser evil.
- Seanambers 3y ago
  Yeah, the technical issues weren't that crazy from the user perspective. The change of features were though. It was a totally different site, people left because the core functionality of the site disappeared over night. Edit - makes me wonder if they used the site themselves.
- swalsh 3y ago
  Was it the V4 rollout where basically every link came from MrBabyMan?
  - 3y ago
tyingq 3y ago
A year or two prior to this, they were also putting linked sites into iframes, with the "digg bar" on top. So they had managed to alienate not just their users, but also the site owners that all the content linked to.
- captainmuon 3y ago
  That can actually be quite useful, if implemented correctly. Even as a site owner I wouldn't mind, because it lets users upvote my content after reading it easily. But evolving browser standards killed it and most of the time it was implemented annoyingly. Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little inconspicuous indicator in the toolbar that lets you vote or comment on the origin site easily.
  - jayknight 3y ago
    There was a reddit toolbar browser extension at one point that did this. If you clicked a link in reddit, you'd get a bar with title, score, comment count, and voting buttons. It was integral to my reddit experience until it stopped working and afaik never worked again.
  - cyanydeez 3y ago
    If reddit and Twitter kill their API, there's probably space for a noutofband plugin that creates arbitrary forums on content. Like, you find a website with an image, you hash the image and that creates your standard forum and voting system. Then wheverver that hash shows up, so does the forum.
    - musingsole 3y ago
      I'm always yearning for a modern StumbleUpon
      - mrguyorama 3y ago
        The problem with a StumbleUpon now that the internet is an everyone thing is that the second it becomes popular, it will contain nothing but spam.
yalogin 3y ago
I was really hoping there would be an analysis of why the v4 was needed from a revenue point of view. The v4 essentially winked the company because no one likes the UX/UI. Digg insisted on it. Interestingly years later, Reddit followed the same route. They moved to the exact same UI that I hated with digg. Luckily they kept the older UI which is what kept me with the site. I am yet to get an answer about why the redesign was necessary and what it would give them they couldn’t get with the old design
- biorach 3y ago
  > why the redesign was necessary and what it would give them they couldn’t get with the old design Revenue. Well, that's what they hoped. At the expense of user experience. Enshittification, but without the lock-in, which ended predictably
- phire 3y ago
  Digg was more or less dead before the v4 launch. They were already losing a flood of users to reddit and other social media networks (facebook and twitter were going though the roof). They had massive issues with voting rings manipulating their algorithm and selling access to their front page. And when new front page spots weren't bought, they were almost always just posts that had reached the front page of reddit several hours earlier. This post also mentions an update to google search which hit them hard, and a bunch of internal issues, senior staff leaving. They had a limited runway and the company was going to run out of money unless they did something. The something they decided to do was "launch digg v4". It wasn't ready from a technical perspective. Worse, it really looks like they skipped the market research step used their once chance to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what worked.
- tomstockmail 3y ago
  While the UI was part of it, a big reason people didn't like it was that corporations had their own accounts and were posting directly in the feeds. That's something that integrated into reddit Reddit a number of years ago, first as ads and now also directly in subreddits, and even longer if you count AMAs or obvious astroturfing. Tangentially related, just yesterday a rideshare company got into hot water for posting support on reddit where they used the persons real name instead of their username.
cainxinth 3y ago
I still read Digg, along with HN, Reddit, slashdot, metafilter, lobste.rs, kottke, boing boing and many other sources of news and links. I’ve always been an information junkie. High brow, low brow, I don’t care. I want it all.
- marban 3y ago
  See https://upstract.com https://upstract.com
- IanKerr 3y ago
  Sorry if it's too much to ask, but would you mind posting a list of your common sources? I'm familiar with everything you've posted, I'm always looking for new sites.
  - cainxinth 3y ago
    http://boingboing.net http://boingboing.net http://digg.com http://digg.com http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.ycombinator.com http://slashdot.org http://slashdot.org http://www.drudgereport.com http://www.drudgereport.com http://www.engadget.com http://www.engadget.com http://www.nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://engineeringblogs.xyz https://engineeringblogs.xyz https://gizmodo.com/latest https://gizmodo.com/latest https://kk.org/cooltools https://kk.org/cooltools https://kottke.org https://kottke.org https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs https://nowiknow.com/archives https://nowiknow.com/archives https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com https://pluralistic.net https://pluralistic.net https://www.bogleheads.org https://www.bogleheads.org https://www.darkroastedblend.com https://www.darkroastedblend.com https://www.garbageday.email/archive https://www.garbageday.email/archive https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends https://www.metafilter.com https://www.metafilter.com https://www.neatorama.com https://www.neatorama.com https://www.newsbreak.com https://www.newsbreak.com https://www.openculture.com https://www.openculture.com https://www.recomendo.com https://www.recomendo.com https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending
ndjdhdidve 3y ago
techbros had the lesson of their life, and learned nothing. still can't relate the failure of adding incremental value and foatering community... defends to again spending all the time on a full rewrite that wasn't even load tested. the sad part is that the whole team did have success! most of them went to be leaders elsewhere spreading their cancerous big-and-bust with their layoff cycles. techbro privilege is real. maybe similar to the political class. no other professions allow such reckless failures.
drumhead 3y ago
Original Digg was what reddit is now. And Reddit was what Hacker news is now. But luckily I cant see a mass migration here from reddit. I cant even see a reddit replacement. Discord is the platform of choice for discussion these days. Most users will either drift off there or find alternative single issue forums to replace what they were viewing on Reddit. This is one of the places i'll come to but I'll see if I can find other communitities with a decent level of activity as well.
- skizm 3y ago
  I remember when hacker news would shut down signups during reddit outages to prevent the mass migration lol. Great move IMO. I don't think they do that any more. Probably because reddit doesn't have nearly as much downtime as in the old days.
- nitia 3y ago
  Lemmy?
  - PhoenixReborn 3y ago
    No chance. If the Twitter/Mastodon debacle taught us anything it's that federated networks have a long way to go before they can achieve anything close to mass adoption.
  - edrxty 3y ago
    There's one guy who spends a ridiculously large amount of time posting nothing but pro Russian and Chinese propaganda on various communities and I've seen people turned off to Lemmy just because of him.
donatj 3y ago
I have been through several full rewrites of major money makers. It’s almost always a really bad idea. Almost being the key word. Beyond second system syndrome, you really have no idea what your users actually like about your product vs your competitors. You’re too close to the product. A rewrite that breaks users muscle memory and frustrates them is the perfect time for a jump to a competitor. You are basically always better off mutating over time at a much more tolerable rate.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
TheCaptain4815 3y ago
People comparing this to reddit today and anticipating a downfall to a new flashy competitor are in for a rude awakening. A huge portion of the country believes in "hate speech" and "election misinformation" as a major issue in the country. If the original reddit were introduced today with the exact same owners (RIP Aaron), rules, and layout, they'd be cut off by AWS, their IP provider, called Nazi's on CNN, etc. On top of that, it's clear a site such as Reddit pushes their political viewpoints forward. Why would they give up such power for a more "balanced" and "fair" site. Look what happened in 2016 when the DNC leaks occurred and Trump stuff was on the frontpage day and night. Personally I hope this does happen and would LOVE to see a few things defaulted in the new reddit. 1) Allow viewing of removed comments. 2) Give mods the ability to remove upvotes in comments (for a more OG message board vibe) 3) A different type of view for a political post. Maybe instead of just seeing the best comment, you'd get the ability to see the top comment + top rebuttal or something.
Andrex 3y ago
Coincidentally, I've been going through Digg's history including v4 and their early history, because it's nostalgic for me. What people don't realize is Digg actually had four founders, depending on how you count them. Owen Byrne[0] has as his bio "The person who built digg for $1000 @ $10/hour, lol". Going by that, I don't think he shared in any equity. The whole site was bootstrapped for apparently $6000 total. People also think Digg turned down Google's $200 million offer, but it was the other way around. Google walked away after some due diligence. Knowing all this, Digg's fall seems kind of inevitable. That said Reddit never really filled that hole IMO. 0. https://twitter.com/owenbyrne https://twitter.com/owenbyrne
- ojbyrne 3y ago
  I had a significant amount of equity. Take most of the numbers with a grain of salt.
  - Andrex 3y ago
    Thank you for clarifying! Thank you, also.
- philovivero 3y ago
  I wasn't a Digg founder, but I worked with them from the earliest days on Digg until its downfall. The real story is probably way more interesting than anyone really would guess. I'll summarise it as so: What made Digg work really was one guy who was a machine. He would vet all the stories, infiltrate all the SEO networks, and basically keep subverting them to keep the Digg front-page usable. Digg had an algorithm, but it was basically just a simple algorithm that helped this one dude 10x his productivity and keep the quality up. Google came to buy Digg, but figured out that really it's just a dude who works 22 hours a day that keeps the quality up, and all that talk of an algorithm was smoke and mirrors to trick the SEO guys into thinking it was something they could game (they could not, which is why front page was so high quality for so many years). Google walked. Then the founders realised if they ever wanted to get any serious money out of this thing, they had to fix that. So they developed "real algorithms" that independently attempted to do what this one dude was doing, to surface good/interesting content. They thought they'd succeeded, or market pressures forced their hand, whatever. So they rolled it along with a catastrophic UI/UX and back-end tech rewrite all rolled up into one. It was a total shit-show. I was involved in the "old" MySQL stack, and watched them totally fuck it up with beta software that wasn't ready for production (Cassandra, at the time, was not what it is today). The algorithm to figure out what's cool and what isn't wasn't as good as the dude who worked 22 hours a day, and without his very heavy input, it just basically rehashed all the shit that was popular somewhere else a few days earlier. So you ended up with a site that was ugly, fuxed, no-one in the existing wanted, and with a bland boring bunch of stories on the front-page, which was not at all compelling for anyone new showing up to check stuff out. Instead of taking this massive slap to the face constructively, the founders doubled-down. And now here we are. To be clear, much of the tech behind Digg was very interesting, the work Owen and many other engineers did was very interesting. The algorithm was all smoke and mirrors, though. And Kevin and his little circle of buddies were all crap engineers that tanked the business with their hubris and inexperience.
thih9 3y ago
Note that this is about the 2010 launch. More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4
runlevel1 3y ago
Fun fact: Digg sold SendGrid its hardware after Digg v4 flopped. This made up a good chunk of our first data center. IIRC, it was a bunch of Penguin Computing boxes in an Equinix DC in San Jose. I think we probably retired the last of them in early 2015.
- HaZeust 3y ago
  Were they auctioning it, or was it direct buy?
  - runlevel1 3y ago
    Direct buy, I think, but I could be wrong.
iJohnDoe 3y ago
I was an avid user of Digg. I remember having to force myself not to spend too much time on the site. I enjoyed the content. Always interesting stuff was posted. I also enjoyed the funny comments. I remember the epic downvotes. The Dumbledore comments. The Photoshop comments. The DVD key comments. Lots of fun. My memory of what happened was this. There was some infighting about the comment threads and how they should be implemented. A new approach got implemented. The site started crawling any time you clicked on a comment. Everyone was saying that of course it wasn’t going to work and a particular person’s approach shouldn’t have been used. The site became unusable. After that it became a blur, because I must have stopped using the site. I believe the downfall of Digg occurred around these changes. I would be curious of other people’s timeline.
synack 3y ago
There was an internal alpha build of Digg v4 that had "verticals", which were kinda like subreddits. If there weren't enough stories to fill up the front page, the backend would run a search query and fill in relevant stories from other verticals, or even external search engines. As a vertical got more users, the user-voted stories would be given priority over the algorithmically chosen ones. From a user perspective, this meant that there was already a subreddit for any topic you could conceive of, even if nobody had ever submitted a story to it. It was pretty magical. Sadly, this whole system was axed in order to get the thing launched before we ran out of money. I bet you could do an even better version of it now with recommendations based on LLM prompts.
knorker 3y ago
Digg v4 failed because the user experience was basically equal to if when someone forgets to renew their domain, and a squatter put up some BS spam site in its place. There was no place for users on Digg v4. And without users, it's hard to get revenue. Was it unreliable at first? I didn't even notice. I just saw what they were aiming for, and noped out.

246 points by jamescun 3y ago

I seem to recall that, years ago, this article's photo[1] of Digg engineers sitting together for the v4 launch used to get posted every now and then. Usually, the idea was to shock people about how awful open offices were. Only today did I learn that this was a photo of an unusual event, and not how people usually sat at Digg. Or maybe I'm thinking of a different photo? [1] https://lethain.com/static/blog/heroes/digg-v4.jpg https://lethain.com/static/blog/heroes/digg-v4.jpg

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sfrench 3y ago
That is the room where all of the eng team worked, but certainly not how it looked on a normal day. If you look, you can spot three clusters of 4 desks around the edges of the room in this picture. There were ~10 clusters of similar size that scattered around a large open space. The worst part about that room was not the open feeling, but rather the silver walls and ceiling

biorach 3y ago

> Our API server was a Python Tornado service... and one of the most frequently accessed endpoint was used to retrieve user by their name or id. Because it supported retrieval by either name or id, it set default values for both parameters as empty lists. This is a super reasonable thing to do! However, Python only initializes default parameters when the function is first evaluated, which means that the same list is used for every call to the function. As a result, if you mutate those values, the mutations span across invocations. How on earth did such a well-known Python footgun ever make it into production? This is the kind of thing that should leap out of the screen for even a mid-level Python developer - and once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot.

Macha 3y ago
Humans aren't perfect. Open source projects have missed unescaped spaces in directory paths that caused the deletion of /usr (Bumblebee), video games have forgotten to check the cwd and deleted vital windows boot files (Eve Online) and operating systems have forgotten to check passwords (MacOS). Given this was 2010 I wouldn't be surprised if they had a less mature development process that doesn't use things people take for granted today, like linters, and pre-merge code reviews. If you assume perfection of humans, maybe 95/100 times it works out and 4/100 it's a small oops, but 1/100 times you get something embarrassing like this
- belter 3y ago
  Completely disagree with the aproach humans are not perfect. This was not a one opportunity only event. Every test case they did not run, every load simulation they did not perform, every chaos test they decided to overlook was an example of humans failing repeatedly. Massive websites were running since the early nineties...And robust software practices are a thing of the sixties.
  - WJW 3y ago
    Agreed, but this was not a solid company in the first place. Rather, Digg was (according to TFA) a failing startup losing money hand over fist that was launching v4 as a hail mary. They were so hard up that no hardware was available for hosting the new environment, so they started reusing v3 servers for v4 while the migration was ongoing. They bet it all on this v4 thing, and lost.
    - dronf23 3y ago
      Funny you should mention that there was no hardware available. Digg had a second cage full of servers in VA as part of a failed attempt to go multi-DC. If that project had ever worked out there would have been 50% more capacity. Those servers and network gear just sat there unused until they finally got liquidated for pennies on the dollar.
- 3y ago

EdwardDiego 3y ago

Waiters? ...really?

esprehn 3y ago
That is/was tech culture, but also the cost of catering an event like this is not that high. Maybe a couple thousand dollars to boost morale? It probably cost the same as a couple of MacBooks or office chairs and those are consolidated costs to individual employees. The catering is divided by everyone.
HeckFeck 3y ago
When you're truly in the zone, even walking for food or booze is too much effort.

neom 3y ago

Kevin Rose: We migrated from LAMP to Cassandra because LAMP doesn't scale and Cassandra does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNBcIPSROs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNBcIPSROs

mr90210 3y ago
Hasn’t Facebook moved away from LAMP because of… scale? Given how many users they have I suppose they know a thing or two about scale.
- neom 3y ago
  Facebook made Cassandra specifically because of this. https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshman-ladis2009.pdf https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshma...
  - esprehn 3y ago
    Later Facebook stopped using Cassandra though, and continues to use MySQL.
    - dmazin 3y ago
      MySQL backed, in turn, by a log structured storage engine (RocksDB). But the they reason they do that is storage space efficiency rather than availability or performance.
  - swalsh 3y ago
    There was a period around 2010 where developers all declared sql dead, and started playing with nosql solutions. My personal experience at the time was, most people didn't have Facebook's scaling problems, and they created terrible tech debts as a result. Eventually most people remembered why SQL was so great, and they added Redis if they needed a cache. The Ruby people though still liked those NoSQL stuff, and I'll never understand them.

shortlived 3y ago

> We had so little capacity that we had decided to reimage all our existing servers and then reprovision them in the new software stack. That's terrifying!

nunobrito 3y ago

Albeit unpopular opinion, this kind of things is one of the reasons why I'll always push for Java instead of a jigsaw of different languages that sound cool. Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly. Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple. Too bad for Digg. Was a good site.

darkstar_16 3y ago
That's not a function of Java.
biorach 3y ago
It's pretty clear from the article that the issues Digg had were not caused by choice of language.
- nunobrito 3y ago
  They literally complain about python bad choices of libraries.
  - biorach 3y ago
    In that article? I'm not seeing that.
    - nunobrito 3y ago
      Yeah. Not really my fault there.
      - stavros 3y ago
        The word "libraries" is not even mentioned in the code. Python is only mentioned to detail a bug that caused a memory leak, I don't know how you generalized this to "Python is to blame for Digg's demise" but that's not anyone else's fault.

deergomoo 3y ago

Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues. I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.

conradfr 3y ago
That's my recollection of it. Just one day the content was not interesting anymore and felt certainly more gamed than before, which they wanted to combat as per this blog post. I'm surprised the conclusion is not that they learn to never do a full rewrite of a social product again.
- broknbottle 3y ago
  This so much. I remember visiting digg after v4 launch and it felt like a totally different site. At the time I remember looking for site that filled void and offered similar content but wasn’t so focused e.g. slashdot and I came upon reddit
thisismyhna 3y ago
Yeap, this was definitely the point where many of us jumped over to Reddit. I remember hating Reddit's interface but it was the lesser evil.
Seanambers 3y ago
Yeah, the technical issues weren't that crazy from the user perspective. The change of features were though. It was a totally different site, people left because the core functionality of the site disappeared over night. Edit - makes me wonder if they used the site themselves.
swalsh 3y ago
Was it the V4 rollout where basically every link came from MrBabyMan?
- 3y ago

tyingq 3y ago

A year or two prior to this, they were also putting linked sites into iframes, with the "digg bar" on top. So they had managed to alienate not just their users, but also the site owners that all the content linked to.

captainmuon 3y ago
That can actually be quite useful, if implemented correctly. Even as a site owner I wouldn't mind, because it lets users upvote my content after reading it easily. But evolving browser standards killed it and most of the time it was implemented annoyingly. Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little inconspicuous indicator in the toolbar that lets you vote or comment on the origin site easily.
- jayknight 3y ago
  There was a reddit toolbar browser extension at one point that did this. If you clicked a link in reddit, you'd get a bar with title, score, comment count, and voting buttons. It was integral to my reddit experience until it stopped working and afaik never worked again.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  If reddit and Twitter kill their API, there's probably space for a noutofband plugin that creates arbitrary forums on content. Like, you find a website with an image, you hash the image and that creates your standard forum and voting system. Then wheverver that hash shows up, so does the forum.
  - musingsole 3y ago
    I'm always yearning for a modern StumbleUpon
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      The problem with a StumbleUpon now that the internet is an everyone thing is that the second it becomes popular, it will contain nothing but spam.

yalogin 3y ago

I was really hoping there would be an analysis of why the v4 was needed from a revenue point of view. The v4 essentially winked the company because no one likes the UX/UI. Digg insisted on it. Interestingly years later, Reddit followed the same route. They moved to the exact same UI that I hated with digg. Luckily they kept the older UI which is what kept me with the site. I am yet to get an answer about why the redesign was necessary and what it would give them they couldn’t get with the old design

biorach 3y ago
> why the redesign was necessary and what it would give them they couldn’t get with the old design Revenue. Well, that's what they hoped. At the expense of user experience. Enshittification, but without the lock-in, which ended predictably
phire 3y ago
Digg was more or less dead before the v4 launch. They were already losing a flood of users to reddit and other social media networks (facebook and twitter were going though the roof). They had massive issues with voting rings manipulating their algorithm and selling access to their front page. And when new front page spots weren't bought, they were almost always just posts that had reached the front page of reddit several hours earlier. This post also mentions an update to google search which hit them hard, and a bunch of internal issues, senior staff leaving. They had a limited runway and the company was going to run out of money unless they did something. The something they decided to do was "launch digg v4". It wasn't ready from a technical perspective. Worse, it really looks like they skipped the market research step used their once chance to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what worked.
tomstockmail 3y ago
While the UI was part of it, a big reason people didn't like it was that corporations had their own accounts and were posting directly in the feeds. That's something that integrated into reddit Reddit a number of years ago, first as ads and now also directly in subreddits, and even longer if you count AMAs or obvious astroturfing. Tangentially related, just yesterday a rideshare company got into hot water for posting support on reddit where they used the persons real name instead of their username.

cainxinth 3y ago

I still read Digg, along with HN, Reddit, slashdot, metafilter, lobste.rs, kottke, boing boing and many other sources of news and links. I’ve always been an information junkie. High brow, low brow, I don’t care. I want it all.

marban 3y ago
See https://upstract.com https://upstract.com
IanKerr 3y ago
Sorry if it's too much to ask, but would you mind posting a list of your common sources? I'm familiar with everything you've posted, I'm always looking for new sites.
- cainxinth 3y ago
  http://boingboing.net http://boingboing.net http://digg.com http://digg.com http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.ycombinator.com http://slashdot.org http://slashdot.org http://www.drudgereport.com http://www.drudgereport.com http://www.engadget.com http://www.engadget.com http://www.nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://engineeringblogs.xyz https://engineeringblogs.xyz https://gizmodo.com/latest https://gizmodo.com/latest https://kk.org/cooltools https://kk.org/cooltools https://kottke.org https://kottke.org https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs https://nowiknow.com/archives https://nowiknow.com/archives https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com https://pluralistic.net https://pluralistic.net https://www.bogleheads.org https://www.bogleheads.org https://www.darkroastedblend.com https://www.darkroastedblend.com https://www.garbageday.email/archive https://www.garbageday.email/archive https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends https://www.google.com/trends/hottrends https://www.metafilter.com https://www.metafilter.com https://www.neatorama.com https://www.neatorama.com https://www.newsbreak.com https://www.newsbreak.com https://www.openculture.com https://www.openculture.com https://www.recomendo.com https://www.recomendo.com https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending

ndjdhdidve 3y ago

techbros had the lesson of their life, and learned nothing. still can't relate the failure of adding incremental value and foatering community... defends to again spending all the time on a full rewrite that wasn't even load tested. the sad part is that the whole team did have success! most of them went to be leaders elsewhere spreading their cancerous big-and-bust with their layoff cycles. techbro privilege is real. maybe similar to the political class. no other professions allow such reckless failures.

drumhead 3y ago

Original Digg was what reddit is now. And Reddit was what Hacker news is now. But luckily I cant see a mass migration here from reddit. I cant even see a reddit replacement. Discord is the platform of choice for discussion these days. Most users will either drift off there or find alternative single issue forums to replace what they were viewing on Reddit. This is one of the places i'll come to but I'll see if I can find other communitities with a decent level of activity as well.

skizm 3y ago
I remember when hacker news would shut down signups during reddit outages to prevent the mass migration lol. Great move IMO. I don't think they do that any more. Probably because reddit doesn't have nearly as much downtime as in the old days.
nitia 3y ago
Lemmy?
- PhoenixReborn 3y ago
  No chance. If the Twitter/Mastodon debacle taught us anything it's that federated networks have a long way to go before they can achieve anything close to mass adoption.
- edrxty 3y ago
  There's one guy who spends a ridiculously large amount of time posting nothing but pro Russian and Chinese propaganda on various communities and I've seen people turned off to Lemmy just because of him.

donatj 3y ago

I have been through several full rewrites of major money makers. It’s almost always a really bad idea. Almost being the key word. Beyond second system syndrome, you really have no idea what your users actually like about your product vs your competitors. You’re too close to the product. A rewrite that breaks users muscle memory and frustrates them is the perfect time for a jump to a competitor. You are basically always better off mutating over time at a much more tolerable rate.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

TheCaptain4815 3y ago

People comparing this to reddit today and anticipating a downfall to a new flashy competitor are in for a rude awakening. A huge portion of the country believes in "hate speech" and "election misinformation" as a major issue in the country. If the original reddit were introduced today with the exact same owners (RIP Aaron), rules, and layout, they'd be cut off by AWS, their IP provider, called Nazi's on CNN, etc. On top of that, it's clear a site such as Reddit pushes their political viewpoints forward. Why would they give up such power for a more "balanced" and "fair" site. Look what happened in 2016 when the DNC leaks occurred and Trump stuff was on the frontpage day and night. Personally I hope this does happen and would LOVE to see a few things defaulted in the new reddit. 1) Allow viewing of removed comments. 2) Give mods the ability to remove upvotes in comments (for a more OG message board vibe) 3) A different type of view for a political post. Maybe instead of just seeing the best comment, you'd get the ability to see the top comment + top rebuttal or something.

Andrex 3y ago

Coincidentally, I've been going through Digg's history including v4 and their early history, because it's nostalgic for me. What people don't realize is Digg actually had four founders, depending on how you count them. Owen Byrne[0] has as his bio "The person who built digg for $1000 @ $10/hour, lol". Going by that, I don't think he shared in any equity. The whole site was bootstrapped for apparently $6000 total. People also think Digg turned down Google's $200 million offer, but it was the other way around. Google walked away after some due diligence. Knowing all this, Digg's fall seems kind of inevitable. That said Reddit never really filled that hole IMO. 0. https://twitter.com/owenbyrne https://twitter.com/owenbyrne

ojbyrne 3y ago
I had a significant amount of equity. Take most of the numbers with a grain of salt.
- Andrex 3y ago
  Thank you for clarifying! Thank you, also.
philovivero 3y ago
I wasn't a Digg founder, but I worked with them from the earliest days on Digg until its downfall. The real story is probably way more interesting than anyone really would guess. I'll summarise it as so: What made Digg work really was one guy who was a machine. He would vet all the stories, infiltrate all the SEO networks, and basically keep subverting them to keep the Digg front-page usable. Digg had an algorithm, but it was basically just a simple algorithm that helped this one dude 10x his productivity and keep the quality up. Google came to buy Digg, but figured out that really it's just a dude who works 22 hours a day that keeps the quality up, and all that talk of an algorithm was smoke and mirrors to trick the SEO guys into thinking it was something they could game (they could not, which is why front page was so high quality for so many years). Google walked. Then the founders realised if they ever wanted to get any serious money out of this thing, they had to fix that. So they developed "real algorithms" that independently attempted to do what this one dude was doing, to surface good/interesting content. They thought they'd succeeded, or market pressures forced their hand, whatever. So they rolled it along with a catastrophic UI/UX and back-end tech rewrite all rolled up into one. It was a total shit-show. I was involved in the "old" MySQL stack, and watched them totally fuck it up with beta software that wasn't ready for production (Cassandra, at the time, was not what it is today). The algorithm to figure out what's cool and what isn't wasn't as good as the dude who worked 22 hours a day, and without his very heavy input, it just basically rehashed all the shit that was popular somewhere else a few days earlier. So you ended up with a site that was ugly, fuxed, no-one in the existing wanted, and with a bland boring bunch of stories on the front-page, which was not at all compelling for anyone new showing up to check stuff out. Instead of taking this massive slap to the face constructively, the founders doubled-down. And now here we are. To be clear, much of the tech behind Digg was very interesting, the work Owen and many other engineers did was very interesting. The algorithm was all smoke and mirrors, though. And Kevin and his little circle of buddies were all crap engineers that tanked the business with their hubris and inexperience.

thih9 3y ago

Note that this is about the 2010 launch. More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4

runlevel1 3y ago

Fun fact: Digg sold SendGrid its hardware after Digg v4 flopped. This made up a good chunk of our first data center. IIRC, it was a bunch of Penguin Computing boxes in an Equinix DC in San Jose. I think we probably retired the last of them in early 2015.

HaZeust 3y ago
Were they auctioning it, or was it direct buy?
- runlevel1 3y ago
  Direct buy, I think, but I could be wrong.

iJohnDoe 3y ago

I was an avid user of Digg. I remember having to force myself not to spend too much time on the site. I enjoyed the content. Always interesting stuff was posted. I also enjoyed the funny comments. I remember the epic downvotes. The Dumbledore comments. The Photoshop comments. The DVD key comments. Lots of fun. My memory of what happened was this. There was some infighting about the comment threads and how they should be implemented. A new approach got implemented. The site started crawling any time you clicked on a comment. Everyone was saying that of course it wasn’t going to work and a particular person’s approach shouldn’t have been used. The site became unusable. After that it became a blur, because I must have stopped using the site. I believe the downfall of Digg occurred around these changes. I would be curious of other people’s timeline.

synack 3y ago

There was an internal alpha build of Digg v4 that had "verticals", which were kinda like subreddits. If there weren't enough stories to fill up the front page, the backend would run a search query and fill in relevant stories from other verticals, or even external search engines. As a vertical got more users, the user-voted stories would be given priority over the algorithmically chosen ones. From a user perspective, this meant that there was already a subreddit for any topic you could conceive of, even if nobody had ever submitted a story to it. It was pretty magical. Sadly, this whole system was axed in order to get the thing launched before we ran out of money. I bet you could do an even better version of it now with recommendations based on LLM prompts.

knorker 3y ago

Digg v4 failed because the user experience was basically equal to if when someone forgets to renew their domain, and a squatter put up some BS spam site in its place. There was no place for users on Digg v4. And without users, it's hard to get revenue. Was it unreliable at first? I didn't even notice. I just saw what they were aiming for, and noped out.