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This is a case of a company having delusions of grandeur. Instead of humming along with 10 or so employees raking in cash hand-over fist, they tried to grow as

This is a case of a company having delusions of grandeur. Instead of humming along with 10 or so employees raking in cash hand-over fist, they tried to grow as fast and as large as possible to try to revolutionize news. Instead, Reddit did the former and is stable and profitable; it never pretends to be something it's not. Not all companies are going to change the world, nor should they. I see Facebook and Twitter making the same mistakes. Perhaps Facebook is a great place to keep in touch with friends but nothing more. Perhaps Twitter is simply a great replacement for blogging, nothing more. Instead of filling their niches and quietly making a small number of employees very wealthy, they try to become these massive institutions that are reliant on very fickle user bases. It's a house of cards.

Tobu 14y ago
It's the nature of venture capital: shower founders with money, now they're burning through it and they are in your debt. Either they find a way to make it big, or the startup is driven to the ground.
codexon 14y ago
As someone who used Digg and Reddit from their infancy I have been able to observe when and how Digg fell from #1. I don't think they failed because they were having delusions of grandeur. The 1st mistake that Digg made was the introduction of power users. As a power user your stories were artificially boosted to the front page. After this happened, I noticed a huge decline in quality where the front page became mostly populated by articles from cracked and huffingtonpost. This quote from another user summed up the situation. In version 3 around 100 diggers ran 80% of the front page – to get on the front page you had to cover Kevin getting a blow job from Stallman, or get a power user to submit your story. At that point Digg was not a democracy at all, but a curated list by paid Digg pros who shilled for hire. If you were a nice guy, or a tech publisher, you had power digger friends who would submit your stuff for you for free. Then there is the 2nd mistake that everyone knows about. Digg 4.0, the last mistake that finally made Reddit bigger than Digg. Large domains Engadget and Mashable flooded the front page with their auto-submitted stories. It was then that Kevin Rose betrayed the power users for large publishers, just as he had betrayed the regular users for power users many years ago. If Digg had not done any of this, there would have been a very good chance that they would still have been the largest aggregator today.
- marknutter 14y ago
  Please; power users were controlling the content on the site long before they turned 3.0 on. It was a well known fact that a small minority of users controlled the vast majority of the front page content (mrbabyman, for instance).
  - codexon 14y ago
    I know this. I was just quoting someone else. I remember when power users came out far before v3. That was when I started browsing Reddit more often.

Tobu 14y ago

It's the nature of venture capital: shower founders with money, now they're burning through it and they are in your debt. Either they find a way to make it big, or the startup is driven to the ground.

codexon 14y ago

As someone who used Digg and Reddit from their infancy I have been able to observe when and how Digg fell from #1. I don't think they failed because they were having delusions of grandeur. The 1st mistake that Digg made was the introduction of power users. As a power user your stories were artificially boosted to the front page. After this happened, I noticed a huge decline in quality where the front page became mostly populated by articles from cracked and huffingtonpost. This quote from another user summed up the situation. In version 3 around 100 diggers ran 80% of the front page – to get on the front page you had to cover Kevin getting a blow job from Stallman, or get a power user to submit your story. At that point Digg was not a democracy at all, but a curated list by paid Digg pros who shilled for hire. If you were a nice guy, or a tech publisher, you had power digger friends who would submit your stuff for you for free. Then there is the 2nd mistake that everyone knows about. Digg 4.0, the last mistake that finally made Reddit bigger than Digg. Large domains Engadget and Mashable flooded the front page with their auto-submitted stories. It was then that Kevin Rose betrayed the power users for large publishers, just as he had betrayed the regular users for power users many years ago. If Digg had not done any of this, there would have been a very good chance that they would still have been the largest aggregator today.

marknutter 14y ago
Please; power users were controlling the content on the site long before they turned 3.0 on. It was a well known fact that a small minority of users controlled the vast majority of the front page content (mrbabyman, for instance).
- codexon 14y ago
  I know this. I was just quoting someone else. I remember when power users came out far before v3. That was when I started browsing Reddit more often.