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RethinkDigg.com
- jedberg 14y agoThey're not off to a good start. I just spent 10 minutes filling out the text boxes on page two, and it just lost all of that info. I hope the site works better than the survey.
- jrlevine 14y agoReally? Just tested again and it worked fine. Sorry about that. @ me on twitter @jrlevine if you're still willing to give feedback.
- jonny_eh 14y agoI filled out the first survey then stopped at page two. I'm too lazy to fill in all those boxes. I hope they didn't lose all that "valuable" info they got from me on page 1.
- iconfinder 14y agoSurvey monkey keeps the answers from page 1
- dylanz 14y agoIt seems to be a SurveyMonkey problem.
- uptown 14y agoSo what'd they buy? No team. Scrapped the old code. 500k for the name, and the ability to get a percentage of their old users to at least take a look when they launch?
- jmduke 14y ago500K for an initial glut of 4million unique dailies? Obviously that number will drop off real quick, but still.
- brackin 14y agoThe brand is worth a fair amount, beta works launching a new news site won't get much attention but "DIGG REBUILT AND RELAUNCHED" could get some international press and at least convince old users to have a look at the new site. It's not that much of a loss for Betaworks considering if they do it right they'll start building a huge company if not they've lost $500k and may make a fair amount of that back from the traffic.
- smacktoward 14y agoThey'll also get a modest press bump when they roll out the "new Digg," like AVOS did when they rolled out the "new Delicious." There'll be press interest in the potential revivial of a once-huge property that there wouldn't necessarily be if they launched under a completely new brand. I dunno if that's worth $500K, $500K can buy a fair bit of PR, but it's something.
- soup10 14y agoYep, (they paid a lot more than that) and it's probably worth it imo. Half the battle with web 2.0 sites is getting enough users to get the ball rolling. Digg already has that, and all they have to do is "reinvent" themselves with a great design and a focus on some set of users that aren't being well served by other community websites. Personally I'd try to target groups that reddit alienates.
- yoasif_ 14y ago> Personally I'd try to target groups that reddit alienates. Who are these groups? I'm (re)starting development of my own social news site, and I'm looking for a userbase to cater to.
- mcfunley 14y agoA SURVEY. Oh this is definitely going to work.
- blu3jack 14y agoIronically, it was "rethinking digg" and "rebuilding it from scratch" that killed it in the first place.
- smacktoward 14y agoYeah, that was my first thought too. The second thought was that ground-up rewrites are almost never a good idea to begin with. You end up throwing out whatever's good about the old property along with all the bad, and risk turning off the members of whatever user base you have left (who presumably stuck around because they saw something they liked in the old version). I suppose the population of Digg users is probably small enough at this point that the new proprietors aren't worried too much about whether they stay or go, though...
- pteromyscus 14y ago>The second thought was that ground-up rewrites are almost never a good idea to begin with. For a complex system, like an OS or a browser. This is a bloody social news site, as trivial an application as it gets. One man can write a half-decent one in a week. And for ramping it up, even the scaling roadblocks and tricks are old news by now to the web building community in general.
- jedberg 14y ago> This is a bloody social news site, as trivial an application as it gets. I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. It's a fairly complex transactional system. > One man can write a half-decent one in a week. No, one man can write something that resembles a social news site in a week, but building a good one that scales takes a bit longer. :) > And for ramping it up, even the scaling roadblocks and tricks are old news by now to the web building community in general. That one I'll agree with. Their initial scaling problems should be fairly well understood.
- mikkom 14y ago> No, one man can write something that resembles a social news site in a week, but building a good one that scales takes a bit longer. :) That totally depends on your available toolset and experience.
- phene 14y agoAbandon the brand and never speak of it again.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoTheir question about "how do you get your news" is very significantly missing Reddit or Hacker News as an answer.
- jrlevine 14y agowow, good call. late night oversight. edited the survey.
- jonny_eh 14y agoThat section should have radio buttons for the rows, not checkboxes.
- mindstab 14y agogoogle reader and tons of blogs and sites
- Codhisattva 14y agoI wouldn't lump HN, Reddit and "Other" together since Reddit is widely read with impressive traffic. It is a significant news site.
- Zarathust 14y agoAm I the only one without a smartphone? I'm still using some old, beaten up Samsung crap which allows me to talk and sms a little. I spend my whole life in front of a computer, I am still always connected. Clearly, they are taking the "mobile" approach, it just doesn't suit me very well
- blhack 14y agoIt's not just your phone. I have an iPhone and an iPad (well...and another convertable netbook "tablet" thing that has been sitting in a project box for over a year), and I don't really "do" mobile. Mobile news? Are people that attention deficient?
- jmduke 14y agoMy favorite time to read news is my commute. I don't get your point.
- brk 14y agoMe too. Hopefully they will use a font big enough to see while I'm driving.
- robryan 14y agoYeah, I am not going to waste 30 minutes of commute time staring at the floor or out the window.
- te_chris 14y agoI bike. Commuting sounds awful.
- blhack 14y agoFor the vast, vast majority of the country, a commute involves piloting a car. Please don't use your phone while doing this.
- MichaelApproved 14y agoJust because people keep up with the news a different way than you do doesnt mean they have A.D.D.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- yuhong 14y agoThis has been submitted into digg itself: http://digg.com/news/technology/digg_rebuilding_from_scratch_in_6_weeks_with_v1_rethinkdigg http://digg.com/news/technology/digg_rebuilding_from_scratch...
- mcantelon 14y ago>What they didn’t mention is that we’re rebuilding it from scratch. In six weeks. Famous last words. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
- chubot 14y agoWasn't rebuilding it from scratch and not being able to go back what caused Digg to fall in the first place? It's kind of rare that you see a company actually make that mistake now. But I guess Digg did.
- redidas 14y agoI'm interested and curious - anyone know of any other articles on this topic? I feel like I've come across a couple "bad" implementations of some concept (as I see it anyways), and thought the best solution would be to start over and redo it. Are there scenarios where starting from scratch is a good idea? How do you know? (As an aside, I don't think starting from scratch will revive Digg. I think its time has passed...)
- romaniv 14y agoThat article is probably the most frequently cited piece of bad engineering advice in the world. Bad and unneeded advice, since most corporate environments are already extremely hostile to any kind of rewrites. Heck, there are companies that still run DOS "servers". Engineering black holes. They suck developer time in and bend all infrastructure around themselves.
- lotyrin 14y agoYep often all the accrued "bug fixes" accumulated in the complicated solution are "fixes" for "bugs" like "Jim didn't know that the language standard library already had a solution for this, so he made it himself, poorly" or "Pam,Bob,and Dave each had to come back and fix Jim's naive solution by coding specific logic for the corner case they each ran into". When the new hire Steve shows up and deletes the whole thing and uses the time-tested model of the wheel, he is not a villain, and anything to suggest otherwise is poor management philosophy that will drive Steves away, leaving you with a bad project, bad management and bad engineers (AKA 99% of every project ever). Even if by doing so Steve introduces bugs in the two-wrongs-make-a-right consuming code (which is simply a bug) and isn't polite enough to discover this on his own. The flexibility and resources to make systematic improvements like these which combat cruft and maintain or repair feature velocity are why QA - automated or otherwise - exists. Honestly though, I don't think the article really means to cover such a scenario. There are many times that engineers decide to replace rather than understand a system which is complex-for-a-reason, this is written specifically with that in mind. I regularly see this as I use/develop against/contribute to Drupal - a marvelously complex-for-a-reason(usually) piece of engineering that happens to be written in PHP - a language with a community that still celebrates simplicity-at-whatever-cost. "Nevermind that the theme/cache/localization/form/whathaveyou system accounts for what I need, it's more than what I need and I don't trust code more complex than I (or any single person with a single use case for that matter) could have written." He doesn't make that clear, but it's the only sense I can make of the article given his degree of experience.
- mikelbring 14y agoSo they have less than 2 weeks left, sounds like they waited till now to post this to insure they can hit that deadline. How much can they really change of the outlook now, based on the survey results?
- xster 14y agoI humbly submit that anything built in 6 weeks is going to be a disaster
- smspence 14y agoStart small and iterate? If built by knowledgeable engineers, I could see it being decent. It won't be awesome at version 1.0, but what ever is?
- MartinCron 14y agoIt won't be "done" in six weeks, but "done" is a very antiquated idea.
- trustfundbaby 14y agoI wonder if the name isn't tarnished enough to hold, whatever comes out next, back from being truly great? It just seems there's enough baggage for people to dismiss the new digg offhand if it isn't named something else. What do you guys think?
- phene 14y agoIt's a dead and despised brand and they're going to have one hell of a time trying to resurrect it. I doubt they can.
- stevoski 14y agoRebuilding? Why not take the working code and refine, refine, refine, continuously, so that each week or two the site is subtly better, less buggy, more usable?
- smspence 14y agoWe have no idea what the code looks like. Maybe some knowledgeable engineers took a look at it and figured it would be better in the long run to just design and build something new themselves, instead of inheriting someone else's hairy, warty code. (I am just offering ideas here, I don't actually know how hairy the code is or how many warts it has.)
- MartinCron 14y agoRebuilding is a lot more stimulating. I had an engineer quit on me when I convinced the team to do incremental updates instead of rolling forward with an over-engineered rebuild that would just trade one set of problems for a different set of problems.
- jdrake3 14y ago"Frankly, my dear, I..."
- dunhamda 14y agohttp://RethinkRethinkDigg.com http://RethinkRethinkDigg.com
- smspence 14y agoRedirects to Reddit.com... clever. In my opinion, Reddit is kind of fun in small doses, but the groupthink and mob mentality over there is unbearable.
- astrodust 14y agoIf any site needs a "rethink" it's Reddit. It's like a garden that's overgrown with weeds.
- glanch 14y agoIt only feels that way if you never bothered to change the subreddits you're subscribed to by default. /funny, /wtf, /videos, /politics are obviously overrun with teens and immaturity. Once you unsubscribe from those and subscribe to smaller, more intellectually focused subreddits, you'll find the 'old reddit'.
- jedberg 14y agoUnsubscribe from the defaults and your experience will be much improved.
- colkassad 14y agoPlease lose the Facebook/Twitter popup. Get rid of a lot of that ad space and social media buttons. "News" should not be a major focus. Programming, gaming, science, and the arts would be a good start. Stop quoting Silicon Valley insiders and relegate them to a corner of the site if you must place any emphasis on "tech". They did a lot to ruin Digg with the endless self-promotion. Acknowledge Reddit like they never did and take inspiration from subreddits, but make them easier to discover. Reddit has yet to do this and it is a noticeable deficiency on their part.
- runn1ng 14y agoThis reminds me of del.icio.us and the new team, that rewrote it from scratch. It is very similar - old product that shone in the past but was out of focus in recent years. The rewrite didn't work right; old users were angry and new users didn't appear. But maybe this will be better, who knows.
- joshu 14y agoThis happened twice. Once at Yahoo, by engineers who really didn't want to understand product decisions, and then again at the new place, by people who didn't have access to the original product decisions.
- ttran4 14y ago"Maybe just put reddit in an iframe?" haha
- gregPC 14y agoIf they do a search function that is exactly the opposite of Reddit, then I will go back to Digg.
- jakechance 14y agoThe first comment on the site when I saw it earlier today was "run reddit in an iframe."
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoI think we're good on digg. It had it's run, arguably way overhyped. Let it go. :)
- njyx 14y agoKudos that they're the new team is getting user feedback. One thing that would be sad to loose is the API - it was one of the first back in 2007.
- newobj 14y agoBecause its a software problem and not a community problem. Right.
- dot 14y agoThey should just put up Kevin Rose's original php version.
- buddylw 14y agoDomain gentrification...
- andrewfelix 14y agoSix weeks!? A well designed static website takes longer than that.
- joeblau 14y agoBe prepared to be amazed. I'm pretty skeptical of what's going to result as well.
- greghinch 14y agoHmm we already have the new Digg. It's called "Hacker News". Good luck, chaps