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Facebook Didn't Kill Digg, Reddit Did
- myakimov 14y agoI was just thinking about this yesterday when I read the Digg article. I used to read Digg all the time, until it got to the point where the comments in each Digg submitted article stated how that article/news story was on reddit first. This is when I found out about reddit... haha
- jgrahamc 14y agoAnd that happened, IMHO, because the people behind reddit didn't behave like jerks and the people behind Digg did. One example of being jerks: http://blog.jgc.org/2006/07/sense-of-humor-failure-at-digg.html http://blog.jgc.org/2006/07/sense-of-humor-failure-at-digg.h... After that I was unbanned, but not after an employee of Digg defamed me in a blog post by making false claims: http://blog.jgc.org/2006/07/unbanned-from-digg.html http://blog.jgc.org/2006/07/unbanned-from-digg.html And here's an example of how reddit people weren't jerks when I inadvertently brought the site great slowness: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/tale-of-two-cultures.html http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/tale-of-two-cultures.html
- mibbitier 14y agoReddit never seemed to have to bother trying to make any profit. They still haven't. Digg wanted to make money. If Conde hadn't bought Reddit, then it would likely have been a far closer race. When your competition isn't interested in making money, you're always going to be at a major disadvantage.
- antidaily 14y agoI'm not so sure. Digg was pretty much already dead when that deal went through.
- staunch 14y agoReddit's burn rate was probably 2% of Digg's. That allowed them to not be as focused on short-term profit.
- adventureful 14y agoIt's always tragic when the profit motive gets in the way of making good products that people want to use. Like in the case of Apple and the way it has made it impossible for them to make great products. Oh wait.
- Toshio 14y agoI also used to read Digg all the time, but over time it became a cesspool of pro-microsoft trolling, and I left in disgust. Imagine being attacked every time you expressed legitimate disappointment with vista. I expect we are going to witness something similar this fall on reddit (and even here) when that new polished turd gets released.
- Rhymenocerus 14y agoEver been to r/politics? Someone's paying college students to patrol some threads to make sure everyone agrees with the hive-mind. It's fun if you can find a good community.
- SrslyJosh 14y agoProof?
- ojbyrne 14y agoReally? I don't remember seeing any pro-microsoft trolling - perhaps it was hidden by the much larger Apple fanboy contingent.
- Toshio 14y ago> Really? Yes, REALLY My memory seems to function better than yours.
- untog 14y agoAnother former Digg user who never saw anything of the sort, and in fact saw far more pro-Apple stuff than anything else.
- Toshio 14y agoI think we all understand how selective memory works, but thanks for the reminder. Let me restate that the pro-microsoft trolls were the reason I left Digg in disgust.
- WestCoastJustin 14y agoPersonally, I feel Digg killed Digg. They were their own worst enemy and drove people to alternatives.
- r00fus 14y agoMy take - Digg killed itself. Kevin Rose either sold out to advertisers or had a tin ear for his site's community.
- xxiao 14y agocan't agree more, was using digg a lot in the past, sicked of seeing Kevin Rose's own news digged up to the top once a while.
- rprasad 14y agoReddit did not kill Digg. Digg killed Digg. Reddit's big break was Digg v4, when most of the community finally jumped ship.
- AtTheLast 14y agoV4 was definitely the tipping point and nail in the coffin for Digg. However, once the Digg community became to large it became difficult to find interesting stories about a particular topic. At the same time twitter, hacker news and many of the sub-reddits became great ways to discover unique content. So a combination of poor product design, a selling out the Digg community and availability of alternatives killed Digg.
- michaelhoffman 14y agoAgreed. People still would have gone elsewhere even if Reddit didn't exist.
- snorkel 14y agoAbsolutely. Digg became so bad that if it were the only news web site on the net then newspapers would've had nothing to worry about.
- Rudism 14y agoI would argue that the "big break" was actually a bad thing for Reddit. The massive influx of disenfranchised Digg users contributed to the decline of quality on Reddit big-time.
- vijayanands 14y agoActually, IMO Hacker News killed Digg. All the news here would have been in Digg otherwise :)
- vijayanands 14y agoTsk tsk. The Lack of a sense of humor.
- grandalf 14y agoActually Digg killed Digg with the redesign. One time after the redesign I went to the site and there was NO CONTENT anywhere. It wanted me to make friends with people before I would get to see any content. I logged in. Still no content. That was the last time I visited digg.com, and I'm sure I'm not alone. My guess is that if the acquirers just rever to the pre-redesign version Digg will come back to life.
- debacle 14y agoI would place almost all of the blame of Digg dying on Digg itself.
- ojbyrne 14y agoIn my opinion (and I was there), the never ending side projects killed Digg. Revision3 (especially), Pownce, Wefollow, etc, etc.
- Kaedon 14y agoI left Digg for Reddit because Reddit's community at the time valued articles with content over images. As Reddit has absorbed Digg's old user base, so too did it absorb much of the culture of Digg. Reddit no longer seems to have much focus on reading and has instead become a place to find funny images, much like Digg in its heyday. It feels inevitable that the culture of a website like Reddit will change over its life span but it bothered me to see it happen first-hand.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- zecho 14y agoBut with Reddit, there are thousands of others who agree with you, who have created tons of subreddits that would be relevant to whatever your interests. Obviously some communities are more active and more interesting than others, but they're around if you look. Here are some great article-based reddits: http://www.reddit.com/r/indepthstories/ http://www.reddit.com/r/indepthstories/ http://www.reddit.com/r/literature/ http://www.reddit.com/r/literature/ http://www.reddit.com/r/longtext/ http://www.reddit.com/r/longtext/ http://www.reddit.com/r/offbeat/ http://www.reddit.com/r/offbeat/ http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/ http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/
- crisnoble 14y agohttp://ww.reddit.com/r/tldr http://ww.reddit.com/r/tldr
- programminggeek 14y agoThe value in Digg was the tribe it created, not the software, not the ads, not the human beings keeping the lights on. It was the tribe of people who found interesting news on the internet and shared it. FB, Reddit, HN did not "kill" Digg. The tribe growing up and or moving on to other things ended Digg. A similar tribe is at Reddit now, but a similar tribe used to live at Slashdot. Before that they probably lived on Usenet message boards or wherever. In college, the comp sci program I was in had a private message board that ended up having a very similar vibe to digg/reddit/slashdot. Tech heavy, at times very heated political and religious debate. Eventually the original group graduated and it's never been quite the same. It seems that each generation has something like digg, slashdot, reddit, whatever... that is "the thing" for hanging out and sharing/complaining about the news of the day or whatever is interesting. They might look like fads because on the internet they peak and crumble pretty quick, but really it is probably a natural cycle that communities and tribes go through. Eventually HN and Reddit will become irrelevant to certain groups and the tribes that live there will move on to the next thing, whatever that might be. I'm guessing the next site like this already exists or is going to be built soon, so any guesses as to what it will be if it's already out there?
- marvin 14y agoFrom my perspective, Reddit is qualitatively different from all the sites you mentioned. Reddit is the first large news site which allows its users to create their own communities. Most of the content on Reddit these days isn't technology- or politically oriented at all. This has changed over the last year or so - there are subreddits for pretty much anything. What makes these communities special is that a lot of them have very specialized and very diverse knowledge, not necessarily related to the subjects Reddit's early adopters were interested in. There are subreddits for science, fitness, finance, sex, art and just about any other subject people would be interested in following. What gets to the default front page doesn't even begin scratching the surface of what the ecosystem has to offer. I have the contrarian opinion that Reddit won't be displaced for a long time in the realm of primarily text-based news sharing and discussion.
- danielweber 14y ago
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- butterfi 14y agoI was struck by the authors comment "Well, they haven’t redesigned since what appears to be 1997, which has pleased their user base who like the simple look." How long before web designers start complaining about reddit the way they complain about craigslist's design?
- moron 14y agoI guess designers could criticize its visual aesthetic, which is pretty austere, but design is how it works in addition to how it looks. I'd say reddit's devs have shown an interest in improving their interface and making it easier to use over time, whereas craigslist has not. You still can't browse apartment listings on a map, which is the reason why the Padmapper thing blew up so big.
- danso 14y agoThe complaints will happen when that simplicity impedes information flow. It's not a matter of visual aesthetics, it's a matter of usefulness. CL's design impedes its usability, independent of its aesthetics. In Craigslist case, there are clearly better ways to browse housing spots than in a list of links with non-standardized location information in the linktext. In Reddit and HN, part of the joy is serendipity...you don't need to aggregate the content behind each link at once...because of the voting system, you don't worry that clicking on the top link will be a waste of time. That's not the case with CL's chronologically ordered list. Reddit has made some concessions with allowing thumbnails of image-based posts to show up. Otherwise, its minimalistic approach serves a real usability purpose and is not simply the result of stagnation.
- true_religion 14y agoUh... picture subreddits are 75% of reddit's frontpage traffic and my little startup thinks that there are better ways of browsing pictures than a long list of thumbnails where the title is even larger than the thumbnail preview.
- SwellJoe 14y ago
- hybrid11 14y agoI used to be a huge Digg fan, and checked it religiously. Digg v4 is what completely drove me away. The Digg v4 idea was good, but poorly executed. They shouldn't have suddenly forced you to follow other people to get your news. They were trying too hard to become a social network like Twitter / Facebook. Instead, I think they should have integrated with Twitter / Facebook to find top news, rather than starting their own social network.
- tibbon 14y agoOne thing I never understood about Digg is why at one point they had around 300 employees and an incredible burn rate- only do less successfully and less efficiently do what Reddit was able to do with 5-10 employees.
- wastedbrains 14y agoI would say diggs attempts at manipulating the front page and banning people, blocking posts, and unfairly pushing some content to the front helped kill it. When I lost faith in the democracy of Digg I just stopped going and spent time with my votes elsewhere (reddit)
- natmaster 14y agoDigg actually killed themselves. Reddit was just there to reap the rewards.
- Vivtek 14y agoI'm pretty sure it's Yahoo! that pulled the trigger.
- benihana 14y agoDigg did not kill Digg. Nor did Reddit, nor Facebook. People using Digg killed it. The same people are now killing Reddit, making it little more than a place to regurgitate memes, nerd pop culture, and rage comics. Reddit and Digg both used to be places to go for interesting discussion based off decent links. Over time, good and insightful discussion gave way to quick-to-consume, funny one-liners. You can see it happening in popular subreddits. Recently the moderators of /r/science started taking a heavy hand and deleting irrelevant comments. This isn't a problem with the sites, it's a problem with the users of these sites. This is democracy in action. It's cable news. People voting don't want to see challenging, thought-provoking content. They want to see things that confirm their biases, or things they can repost to facebook for quick laughs from their friends.
- chaostheory 14y ago> People using Digg killed it. The same people are now killing Reddit, making it little more than a place to regurgitate memes 1) With sub-reddits, this hasn't become as big of a problem unless a lot of users still keep the sub-reddits that annoy them. There is a reddit for everyone, especially since anyone can create their own sub-reddit. While Digg only had one idea tribe, Reddit has many. Moreover users that create their own sub-reddits can police them with other like-minded users. 2) Reddit is able to fit more content per page given their design. I don't have to keep clicking the next page link to get more.
- dwc 14y agoI like reddit, almost completely because I've subscribed to several small subreddits that have a good community, high quality content, et al. But there's a tricky problem. Subreddits like /r/programming dominate, while more focused subreddits like /r/ruby (or whatever) languish. If I have a ruby link and I care at all about karma, I'm going to post it in /r/programming.
- chaostheory 14y agoWell that's the price for avoiding garbage, you have to do a little more work. It's not impossible to successfully have a branch of an existing sub-reddit. Just take a look at the offshoots of r/gaming: r/gamingnews and r/games; or even the branches off from r/politics like r/progressive and r/libertarian. In your case, ruby already has a good news site and it doesn't need reddit. Rubyflow is more than sufficient imo
- crisnoble 14y agoI am surprised no one has liked to ncomment's rendition of the how the digg vs reddit war went down. Part 1: http://ncomment.com/blog/2009/04/08/war-13/ http://ncomment.com/blog/2009/04/08/war-13/ Part 2: http://ncomment.com/blog/2009/12/17/war-23/ http://ncomment.com/blog/2009/12/17/war-23/ Part 3: http://ncomment.com/blog/2012/01/06/war-33/ http://ncomment.com/blog/2012/01/06/war-33/
- rickmb 14y agoNobody killed Digg. Digg committed suicide by telling it's original, loyal user base to go fuck themselves in it's quest for more money and a broader audience. Digg became too greedy. But it was pretty obvious much earlier on that Digg had zero respect for its users. In many ways, Digg had a very old school broadcast attitude: the users were merely part of the product, only the advertisers mattered.
- jshen 14y agoThe problem digg faced is that their loyal customers were not sufficient to warrant the amount of money they had raised. If they had done nothing, it would have been suicide as well.
- dredmorbius 14y agoThe problem they faced, then, was in deluding themselves about their valuation, and raising more capital (and incurring greater obligations) than they could meet. Digg were apparently sustainable at their prior valuation, and with their existing userbase. Icarus problem.
- jshen 14y agoby this logic nearly all startups are delusional. I don't think I'd frame it this way.
- dredmorbius 14y agoNot quite. Digg was viable previously. Hence the Icarus problem. They tried to fly too high. Most startups are stillborn. That's a different Greek myth.
- jshen 14y agoyeah, but I think they believed they could grow into something bigger. I.e, the same thing all startups believe, and typically fail to do. Don't get me wrong, I think they'd have been far better off taking far less money and simply being a profitable property. I think nearly all startups would be better off doing this. I just don't believe that digg did anything abnormal for a typical startup.
- ajays 14y agoIMHO, Digg killed Digg. In any such ecosystem where the inmates are running the asylum, pissing them off is not a good course of action. The tribe knew that it was the reason why Digg was what Digg was. But arrogance on the part of the upper management at Digg was its downfall; they couldn't come to terms with the basic fact that the people were responsible for Digg's success. So they decided to tweak it, "enhance" it, modify it to "Digg 2.0", and the people revolted. Lesson: if you are a user-driven site, listen to them. Don't piss them off.
- cletus 14y agoNone of these things killed Digg. Digg was simply a transitional meme. Prior to the Internet you had mass media controlling distribution. The Internet comes along and you have things like Usenet and the proto-Web. Then comes the first crowdsourcing sites to allow people to find content without employing people to curate that information. Slashdot was certainly early in this trend. What Digg allowed is a certain band of people to control the information flow. People would get paid to promote submissions as it became clear that a front-page submission generated a lot of pageviews. But what became apparent with all these community sites (and this includes forums) is they start with an early group who provide value to each other. This group ends up becoming insular. De facto standards form. But even in the Usenet days you had the "September" problem (where new college freshmen would get Internet access and not understand the "rules" and conventions that were in place and would ask questions that had already been answered, etc). Basically all these social sites get worse over time as the masses flood in. Digg died because the idea that there is a central source for news was a holdover idea from the old media days. Reddit understood this. Global reddit is basically useless. The subreddits are the only remotely interesting thing about reddit. People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future. I've heard the same complaints about Twitter. Facebook for most people is not a source of news. It doesn't have the same link-sharing mindshare (IMHO) for most people that other mediums have. Ultimately I think the biggest use case for Facebook is still sharing photos. People go to Facebook to find out what their friends are doing. Very few go to find out what's going on in the world (much as Facebook would like that to be the case). I'm surprised at how some wax lyrical on how amazing reddit is. It's just a minor tweak on a long trend of existing prior art (the subreddits). Personally I think it's a cesspool full of trolls. Proggit (programming.reddit.com) is (IMHO) just awful.
- loganfrederick 14y agoI agree with most of your post, but would clarify: >> People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future. Two things: 1. "Worse" is subjective. 2. I think it's more of a trade-off between quality and size. Hacker News doesn't have to get "worse", but would have to remain niche in order to avoid it. That is why subreddits can succeed, because Reddit is essentially a platform for lots of niche communities.
- unreal37 14y agoI think businesses face significant hurdles (and are likely to die) when the founders lose interest in running them. Digg. Twitter (Dorsey left but came back and saved it). Yahoo. Flickr. MySpace. The list is endless. Even Microsoft is not the same since Bill Gates handed the reigns to Ballmer. They're just too big (Office/Windows cash cows) to actually die from that. Founder disinterest is lethal.
- kn0thing 14y agoHere's the blog post TechCrunch flamed me about (called me a liar and whatnot). I wrote it after I tried the alpha of diggv4, but before it was released to the public; I have no idea what happened internally, but the resulting product was indeed pretty devastating -- the final self-inflicted wound after years of encouraging power users and sacrificing the best interests of the userbase: http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose
- conductr 14y agoAs I remember it, Digg forced some updates on it's users that they (we) did not like and were very vocal about. Facebook does the same thing, except there were other options for Digg users (reddit), Facebook users have a steep cost of moving to another service - I would actually argue Facebook users have no other options
- toddhd 14y agoAs an ex-Digger, I can tell you that it was Digg that killed Digg for me. At one point in time, Digg was cool. Granted, it was still mostly a rehash of news from Reddit, 4Chan and other sites, but the audience base was large enough to provide original content as well, and the UI was considerably better than any of the other sites. What killed it (for me anyway) was that Digg suddenly allowed advertisers to start posting away. Ads popped up everywhere, and every other post from directly from Mashable. Digg was no longer cool, and mostly, it was Mashable's alternative site. :) I switched to Reddit. Reddit didn't like all the Digg users migrating over initially, but attitudes have cooled over time. I can't really see a move that Digg could make at this point that would entice me back.
- marcamillion 14y agoFacebook, Twitter, Reddit didn't kill Digg. Digg killed Digg. Kevin got caught in a situation where he had to please investors and they were looking at what other people were doing and he stop innovating and started copying. That's what killed Digg. Nothing else.
- dan_yall 14y agoMaybe I'm the only one, but I moved from digg to reddit entirely because digg was blocked at work and reddit wasn't. I've worked at four different places in the last five years and at each one I expect to see reddit blocked as well, but no one has gotten around to it. Maybe my situation is atypical, but I have to believe that the lack of availability of digg to office-bound slackers had to have played some part in it's demise.
- mirceagoia 14y agoDigg was killed NOT by Facebook OR Reddit...but by its power users. Those killed Digg.
- binarycrusader 14y agoNo, sorry, as someone that used Digg regularly on a daily basis, Digg killed Digg. The day that Digg changed their interface was the day they lost a huge portion of their users, including me. I went back once more after that, and then never again.
- officemonkey 14y agoThe tipping point, IMHO, was when Digg banned people from typing the following number: "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0." As soon as that happened, Digg lost the alpha nerds. The rest was destiny played out over time.
- paulhauggis 14y agoI loved digg. When it was first out, I was able to get roughly 70,000 people to my website per week by just posting an article and having my friends digg it.
- zmmmmm 14y agoReddit is a bit like the craigslist of news aggregators. They've resisted the lure of monetizing in any big way and continue resolutely to put their users first. Digg got overambitious and sold out and their users smelled it and left.
- yaix 14y agoReddit Didn't Kill Digg, Digg Did I read a bit of the discussion on Reddit, and there were surprisingly (to me) many people that had used Digg before. Then something called "v4" came and Digg became unusable to many people. As I understood the discussion. Digg didn't care. So its users looked for alternatives and moved to Reddit. Digg still didn't care. People got used to Reddit and stayed. Digg still didn't care. Yesterday I looked at Digg.com for the first time in years. Only a quick look and I spotted already a number of beginners mistakes only in the front page design. For example the clickable headlines to the stories: they are the main content. Yet they are very /very/ light and hard to read on the white background. WTF. You want your main content to have /good contrast/ and stand out, and secondary stuff (like "points" or "who submitted" or "vote buttons") to have less contrasts as to not distract from your main content. Yet, even such basic things Digg gets wrong. I didn't dare to digg further.
- cliveholloway 14y agoDIGG killed Digg. The week after V 3.0 launched was a mess. Tons of corporate sponsored posts (AKA intrusive adverts), often multiple submissions by the same person on the front page at the same time, and other weirdness. Reddit was right place, right time to pick up the exodus. I don't think it did anything to kill Digg.
- krsunny 14y agoThis is news?
- asdfasdghasdf 14y agoThis article will be useful for the zero people who think Facebook killed Digg.
- gubatron 14y agono, Digg killed digg. They didn't listen to the community and they lost user data and did nothing to recover it, at least that was my experience after loosing several thousand diggs on my user account and then being reset to 0. You can't imagine the piss off.
- velodrome 14y agoDigg v4 killed Digg. Reddit filled the void. End of story.
- antithesis 14y ago> What did Reddit do right that Digg did wrong? Well, they haven’t redesigned since what appears to be 1997, which has pleased their user base who like the simple look. Reddit was founded in 1997?
- milkingcowboy 14y agoTo simple put it there was a time when Digg used to be as simple as Reddit, then Kevin Rose got consumed by his own fame of this and that, the kid forgot to focus managing this one and other companies as well (Digg, Pownce, Milk). Did anyone remember Leah Culver? hehehehehe.