9 ms·

Kevin Rose reflects on Digg, the dangers of outside investors, and his legacy

62 points by iProject 14y ago

debacle 14y ago
> ...news they’d seen on Twitter, rather than news they might have previously seen on Digg. Reddit, for the most part, does not have this problem - reddit is about the community and the discussion, not about the MLP. Maybe Rose still doesn't understand (or maybe doesn't want to admit) why Digg failed. > Rose also said that Digg hired individuals with very niche skills, like developers who only knew PHP and were not as useful once PHP went out of use. If you own a startup, and you're hiring the kind of programmer that only knows one language, you're already making some pretty big mistakes.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  >reddit is about the community and the discussion This is very true. While you might look at it and think it's any other "news"/"meme" site, it is actually a large community made up of smaller, sub-communities, devoted to a very wide variety of topics. My Little Pony? Covered. Nonsensical technical babble? Covered. London? Covered. Obscure Japanese visual novel? Covered. AMAs? Covered. I think this is why reddit continues to grow and stick around. People aren't just there for the jokes, they are there for the community, and the communities which match their interests.
  - alex_c 14y ago
    >Nonsensical technical babble? Covered. I hope you're not referring to http://www.reddit.com/r/vxjunkies http://www.reddit.com/r/vxjunkies. I'll admit it is a bit hard to follow for the layman, but it's generally a great resource full of smart people and insightful discussion.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
      Sorry, that was from a common perspective. VXJunkies is a great source of information, particularly regarding recalibrating voqueon deltas.
- obtu 14y ago
  (MLP: Mindless Link Passing, a term that I think originates from kuro5hin)
  - streptomycin 14y ago
    Propagation
  - debacle 14y ago
    Propagation, but yes I should have defined my abbreviation.
citricsquid 14y ago
As much as everyone loves to blame Digg v4 for Digg's failure I don't think that's entirely accurate. I definitely think that v4 sped up the demise, but Digg as a product was not what the majority of people wanted. If you compare Digg and reddit the differences are pretty big, beyond the basic premise ("links that people vote on") Digg had a very big focus on news and "social" whereas reddit focuses on content, whether that's farmed from elsewhere or created by reddit users. If you compare the top 100 links from r/all vs. digg.com/all you can see a clear difference in content. A Digg type site definitely has a place on the internet, as it's been shown Digg still has traffic now, I just think reddit was the natural successor to Digg, regardless of the mistakes Digg made. I think reddit vs. Digg can be compared to Twitter. Twitter would never have worked in 2001, the internet just wasn't ready for it, but in 2012 it's doing incredibly well. The internet wasn't ready for what reddit is now in 2004. Digg catered to what people in 2004 wanted, but it doesn't cater to what people want in 2012. reddit succeeded because reddit is more of a platform than it is a website, it offers the basic framework for a community link sharing website but their focus was loose enough (with stuff like subreddits) that it was able to evolve with the internet. If that makes any sense...
- debacle 14y ago
  I think the difference is that reddit can be exactly what you want it to be, to an extent. Or, rather, of the 100s of communities on reddit, you only have to belong to a select few of them if you so desire, and the kinds of communities you can find on reddit are vast, varied, and uniquely interesting.
  - steven_h 14y ago
    This is exactly what makes reddit so great. I don't have to look at pictures of cats and rage comics if I only want to se stuff about programming/technology/etc.
  - 7952 14y ago
    This also allows it to evolve. Some sub-reddits with reddit enhancement suite installed are more like pinterest.
mcfunley 14y ago
> Rose also said that Digg hired individuals with very niche skills, like developers who only knew PHP and were not as useful once PHP went out of use. "v4 would have worked out if only my employees were smarter" is a pretty classless and delusional assessment of what went wrong.
- shard972 14y ago
  Really? He touches on 1 of the problems he encountered with digg and you interpret this as Kevin throwing his employees under the bus?
  - yardie 14y ago
    He's been throwing his employees under the bus for over a year now. The site was written in PHP by PHP developers. Somehow that wasn't good enough so he pivoted and replaced them with C++ developers. Anyway, I liked Digg. Then then newer users got involved and stories they didn't like got buried. The first time I used it the articles were technical and really interesting. Then it got political, stupid memes, etc. In its default state I think it was better than Reddit. Reddit is great but you have to work on it. Clean your browser cache and look at reddit like you're going their for the first time. What do you see? Crap from r/AWW, r/atheism, and r/politics take up all or most of the frontpage.
    - mattdeboard 14y ago
      Then unsubscribe from those subreddits and subscribe to those that appeal to your interests. Manicure your own content a little bit.
      - pkteison 14y ago
        As a new user, how do you know that it's good enough to be worth logging in and investing the effort? The default front page is your initial impression, and it does not appear like it is likely to attract interesting people to talk to in its current state.
swalsh 14y ago
“We ran into these huge problems, and didn’t have generalists who could go up and down the stack,” I'm sure this is a cherry picked quote, but it surprises me that he thought the technologists he hired had to do with any of their problems other then performance. Sites like Reddit/Digg/HN live and die by the community they frame. The communities seem to accept an unusually high down time. As Reddit started becoming more mainstream it benefited from segmentation. HN, has benefited from a foundation of considerate users, which are given more privileges then newer users. Digg allowed bad users to dilute good users until good users broke down and decided to seek refuge outside of the site.
- caseysoftware 14y ago
  This just feels like blame shifting to anyone but himself. If they needed generalists, why didn't he hire generalists? My understanding is V4 was a mishmash of numerous technologies and all along, it sounded like there wasn't a vision for how the pieces would work together.. just a vague goal.
emehrkay 14y ago
I like Rose. In a lot of ways he represents the best of my generation of entrepreneurs more than Zuckerberg and anyone else in that era. The fact that he keeps working, and seems to always have something new, is inspiring and in a way, motivates me to do the same. Pownce was ahead of its time. Had it been released in 2011, it would be a viable twitter alternative. I guess that's what he was getting at with how he wants his legacy to be seen.
- balac 14y ago
  How can he possibly be the best when everyone one of his projects have failed? I also admire him, but lately he seems better at angel investing and spotting other peoples successes than building his own.
  - emehrkay 14y ago
    Is being an entrepreneur more about winning or persevering?
    - afterburner 14y ago
      Surely most people want to be a successful entrepreneur...
      - emehrkay 14y ago
        And Kevin Rose hasn't been successful? How long does a company you started need to live on after you've left for it to be considered successful (Digg)? Was Digg not the go-to, poster-site, of web2.0 a time? Is that not a success?
        duaneb 14y ago
        Generally, a company's purpose is to make money. Digg lost $40 million. How is that a success?
        afterburner 14y ago
kn0thing 14y ago
My thoughts on why reddit won: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smallest-biggest http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle... At the time, my open letter got me lambasted by the TechCrunch posse (badge of honor?), but I do hope all founders can learn from the digg story: http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose Since Steve and I first learned of digg (a couple weeks after we launched) all the way to right now (as a board member) -- I'm always reminding myself of how little there's to be gained from thinking about competition. Founders, regarding competitors, be aware but don't care! Also: one probably shouldn't publicly blow your nose on a competitor's shirt. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyqe7A5ombA&feature=player_detailpage#t=41s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyqe7A5ombA&feature=playe...
- jedberg 14y ago
  > Since Steve and I first learned of digg (a couple weeks after we launched) all the way to right now (as a board member) -- I'm always reminding myself of how little there's to be gained from thinking about competition. Founders, regarding competitors, be aware but don't care! I don't think people realize how rarely we talked about or looked at Digg in the reddit office. Every time I see founders who have a screen in their office dedicated to their competitors website I cry a little inside. Luckily it doesn't seem to happen often.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  Since Steve and I first learned of digg (a couple weeks after we launched) all the way to right now (as a board member) -- I'm always reminding myself of how little there's to be gained from thinking about competition. Founders, regarding competitors, be aware but don't care! On a related note, something I saw or read recently made a point that "more companies die of suicide, than homicide." I think that's a pretty apt statement... well, maybe not "suicide" but "self inflicted wounds" at least.
ojbyrne 14y ago
I find the whole we (investors, "founders")/they (non-generalists who can't move up and down the stack) kind of jarring, especially since I somehow managed to fall into the gap between founders and employees. Programmers are generally opinionated, especially about the domain they work in. My impression of Kevin's problems with programmers when I was there (inception to October 2007) is that they gave him too much shit, criticized his ideas, and generally created hassles for him (all good things, IMO), and he didn't really handle that well (IMO). Forget "moving up and down the stack," they wanted to _architect_ the stack. If you're non-technical and come back from some conference and say we're now rearchitecting in Rails/Node/Brainfuck/whatever cool new tech you just heard about, you're probably going to get some pushback. And that pushback, from the other side's perspective, could be presented as "you're just a non-generalist who can't move up and down the stack." Its important to remember that Kevin isn't really technical.
- duaneb 14y ago
  I know little to nothing about Digg and even less about Kevin Rose, internal drama, et al... however, hiring people who are locked into certain technologies, especially non-optimal ones like PHP, seems to be a bad idea.
  - ojbyrne 14y ago
    My point was that nobody was locked into any language. But if you have a large complex website with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, the company is somewhat locked in to the language. When some non-technical executive mandates that we're all switching to language X and everything is going to be rebuilt from scratch, you will get some pushback.
gavinlynch 14y ago
To be honest, I think at some point the user-base and comment section just became too much for me. There was a certain strain of conversation that everything inevitably devolved into, and I left and I know a lot of other people left when that became too much.
- duaneb 14y ago
  This applies to every social community once it gets popular, though. The front page of Reddit used to be tolerable, for instance.
  - gavinlynch 14y ago
    Although I've never really been a reddit user, I can see your point. It's an interesting question: how do you actively maintain a culture of respect, thoughtfulness and two-way dialog? This is one of the few spots I've ever seen it on. As a newcomer to HN, I find it very unique. Great resource.
snorkel 14y ago
" ... when we sort of put out a word that this was up for sale [...] there were spam sites wanted to make it a link farm, and a bunch of properties that would have really screwed things up" Yeah, that would've been terrible compared to what actually happened.
estacado 14y ago
The way I see it, what went wrong with Digg was the amount of influence "superstar" users had on the stories that make the front page. The fact that they kept and displayed the "ranking" of users just shows how this culture of superstardom is ingrained within Digg mechanics itself. It may not have effected the traffic or growth at the time, but it did affect the quality of stories highlighted. Digg knew its system was being gamed and I think that is what pushed them to make the changes they did on v4 (apart from the money), where publishers were given priority over individually submitted stories.

62 points by iProject 14y ago

> ...news they’d seen on Twitter, rather than news they might have previously seen on Digg. Reddit, for the most part, does not have this problem - reddit is about the community and the discussion, not about the MLP. Maybe Rose still doesn't understand (or maybe doesn't want to admit) why Digg failed. > Rose also said that Digg hired individuals with very niche skills, like developers who only knew PHP and were not as useful once PHP went out of use. If you own a startup, and you're hiring the kind of programmer that only knows one language, you're already making some pretty big mistakes.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
>reddit is about the community and the discussion This is very true. While you might look at it and think it's any other "news"/"meme" site, it is actually a large community made up of smaller, sub-communities, devoted to a very wide variety of topics. My Little Pony? Covered. Nonsensical technical babble? Covered. London? Covered. Obscure Japanese visual novel? Covered. AMAs? Covered. I think this is why reddit continues to grow and stick around. People aren't just there for the jokes, they are there for the community, and the communities which match their interests.
- alex_c 14y ago
  >Nonsensical technical babble? Covered. I hope you're not referring to http://www.reddit.com/r/vxjunkies http://www.reddit.com/r/vxjunkies. I'll admit it is a bit hard to follow for the layman, but it's generally a great resource full of smart people and insightful discussion.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
    Sorry, that was from a common perspective. VXJunkies is a great source of information, particularly regarding recalibrating voqueon deltas.
obtu 14y ago
(MLP: Mindless Link Passing, a term that I think originates from kuro5hin)
- streptomycin 14y ago
  Propagation
- debacle 14y ago
  Propagation, but yes I should have defined my abbreviation.

citricsquid 14y ago

As much as everyone loves to blame Digg v4 for Digg's failure I don't think that's entirely accurate. I definitely think that v4 sped up the demise, but Digg as a product was not what the majority of people wanted. If you compare Digg and reddit the differences are pretty big, beyond the basic premise ("links that people vote on") Digg had a very big focus on news and "social" whereas reddit focuses on content, whether that's farmed from elsewhere or created by reddit users. If you compare the top 100 links from r/all vs. digg.com/all you can see a clear difference in content. A Digg type site definitely has a place on the internet, as it's been shown Digg still has traffic now, I just think reddit was the natural successor to Digg, regardless of the mistakes Digg made. I think reddit vs. Digg can be compared to Twitter. Twitter would never have worked in 2001, the internet just wasn't ready for it, but in 2012 it's doing incredibly well. The internet wasn't ready for what reddit is now in 2004. Digg catered to what people in 2004 wanted, but it doesn't cater to what people want in 2012. reddit succeeded because reddit is more of a platform than it is a website, it offers the basic framework for a community link sharing website but their focus was loose enough (with stuff like subreddits) that it was able to evolve with the internet. If that makes any sense...

debacle 14y ago
I think the difference is that reddit can be exactly what you want it to be, to an extent. Or, rather, of the 100s of communities on reddit, you only have to belong to a select few of them if you so desire, and the kinds of communities you can find on reddit are vast, varied, and uniquely interesting.
- steven_h 14y ago
  This is exactly what makes reddit so great. I don't have to look at pictures of cats and rage comics if I only want to se stuff about programming/technology/etc.
- 7952 14y ago
  This also allows it to evolve. Some sub-reddits with reddit enhancement suite installed are more like pinterest.

mcfunley 14y ago

> Rose also said that Digg hired individuals with very niche skills, like developers who only knew PHP and were not as useful once PHP went out of use. "v4 would have worked out if only my employees were smarter" is a pretty classless and delusional assessment of what went wrong.

shard972 14y ago
Really? He touches on 1 of the problems he encountered with digg and you interpret this as Kevin throwing his employees under the bus?
- yardie 14y ago
  He's been throwing his employees under the bus for over a year now. The site was written in PHP by PHP developers. Somehow that wasn't good enough so he pivoted and replaced them with C++ developers. Anyway, I liked Digg. Then then newer users got involved and stories they didn't like got buried. The first time I used it the articles were technical and really interesting. Then it got political, stupid memes, etc. In its default state I think it was better than Reddit. Reddit is great but you have to work on it. Clean your browser cache and look at reddit like you're going their for the first time. What do you see? Crap from r/AWW, r/atheism, and r/politics take up all or most of the frontpage.
  - mattdeboard 14y ago
    Then unsubscribe from those subreddits and subscribe to those that appeal to your interests. Manicure your own content a little bit.
    - pkteison 14y ago
      As a new user, how do you know that it's good enough to be worth logging in and investing the effort? The default front page is your initial impression, and it does not appear like it is likely to attract interesting people to talk to in its current state.

swalsh 14y ago

“We ran into these huge problems, and didn’t have generalists who could go up and down the stack,” I'm sure this is a cherry picked quote, but it surprises me that he thought the technologists he hired had to do with any of their problems other then performance. Sites like Reddit/Digg/HN live and die by the community they frame. The communities seem to accept an unusually high down time. As Reddit started becoming more mainstream it benefited from segmentation. HN, has benefited from a foundation of considerate users, which are given more privileges then newer users. Digg allowed bad users to dilute good users until good users broke down and decided to seek refuge outside of the site.

caseysoftware 14y ago
This just feels like blame shifting to anyone but himself. If they needed generalists, why didn't he hire generalists? My understanding is V4 was a mishmash of numerous technologies and all along, it sounded like there wasn't a vision for how the pieces would work together.. just a vague goal.

emehrkay 14y ago

I like Rose. In a lot of ways he represents the best of my generation of entrepreneurs more than Zuckerberg and anyone else in that era. The fact that he keeps working, and seems to always have something new, is inspiring and in a way, motivates me to do the same. Pownce was ahead of its time. Had it been released in 2011, it would be a viable twitter alternative. I guess that's what he was getting at with how he wants his legacy to be seen.

balac 14y ago
How can he possibly be the best when everyone one of his projects have failed? I also admire him, but lately he seems better at angel investing and spotting other peoples successes than building his own.
- emehrkay 14y ago
  Is being an entrepreneur more about winning or persevering?
  - afterburner 14y ago
    Surely most people want to be a successful entrepreneur...
    - emehrkay 14y ago
      And Kevin Rose hasn't been successful? How long does a company you started need to live on after you've left for it to be considered successful (Digg)? Was Digg not the go-to, poster-site, of web2.0 a time? Is that not a success?
      - duaneb 14y ago
        Generally, a company's purpose is to make money. Digg lost $40 million. How is that a success?
      - afterburner 14y ago

kn0thing 14y ago

My thoughts on why reddit won: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smallest-biggest http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle... At the time, my open letter got me lambasted by the TechCrunch posse (badge of honor?), but I do hope all founders can learn from the digg story: http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose Since Steve and I first learned of digg (a couple weeks after we launched) all the way to right now (as a board member) -- I'm always reminding myself of how little there's to be gained from thinking about competition. Founders, regarding competitors, be aware but don't care! Also: one probably shouldn't publicly blow your nose on a competitor's shirt. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyqe7A5ombA&feature=player_detailpage#t=41s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyqe7A5ombA&feature=playe...

jedberg 14y ago
> Since Steve and I first learned of digg (a couple weeks after we launched) all the way to right now (as a board member) -- I'm always reminding myself of how little there's to be gained from thinking about competition. Founders, regarding competitors, be aware but don't care! I don't think people realize how rarely we talked about or looked at Digg in the reddit office. Every time I see founders who have a screen in their office dedicated to their competitors website I cry a little inside. Luckily it doesn't seem to happen often.
mindcrime 14y ago
Since Steve and I first learned of digg (a couple weeks after we launched) all the way to right now (as a board member) -- I'm always reminding myself of how little there's to be gained from thinking about competition. Founders, regarding competitors, be aware but don't care! On a related note, something I saw or read recently made a point that "more companies die of suicide, than homicide." I think that's a pretty apt statement... well, maybe not "suicide" but "self inflicted wounds" at least.

ojbyrne 14y ago

I find the whole we (investors, "founders")/they (non-generalists who can't move up and down the stack) kind of jarring, especially since I somehow managed to fall into the gap between founders and employees. Programmers are generally opinionated, especially about the domain they work in. My impression of Kevin's problems with programmers when I was there (inception to October 2007) is that they gave him too much shit, criticized his ideas, and generally created hassles for him (all good things, IMO), and he didn't really handle that well (IMO). Forget "moving up and down the stack," they wanted to _architect_ the stack. If you're non-technical and come back from some conference and say we're now rearchitecting in Rails/Node/Brainfuck/whatever cool new tech you just heard about, you're probably going to get some pushback. And that pushback, from the other side's perspective, could be presented as "you're just a non-generalist who can't move up and down the stack." Its important to remember that Kevin isn't really technical.

duaneb 14y ago
I know little to nothing about Digg and even less about Kevin Rose, internal drama, et al... however, hiring people who are locked into certain technologies, especially non-optimal ones like PHP, seems to be a bad idea.
- ojbyrne 14y ago
  My point was that nobody was locked into any language. But if you have a large complex website with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, the company is somewhat locked in to the language. When some non-technical executive mandates that we're all switching to language X and everything is going to be rebuilt from scratch, you will get some pushback.

gavinlynch 14y ago

To be honest, I think at some point the user-base and comment section just became too much for me. There was a certain strain of conversation that everything inevitably devolved into, and I left and I know a lot of other people left when that became too much.

duaneb 14y ago
This applies to every social community once it gets popular, though. The front page of Reddit used to be tolerable, for instance.
- gavinlynch 14y ago
  Although I've never really been a reddit user, I can see your point. It's an interesting question: how do you actively maintain a culture of respect, thoughtfulness and two-way dialog? This is one of the few spots I've ever seen it on. As a newcomer to HN, I find it very unique. Great resource.

snorkel 14y ago

" ... when we sort of put out a word that this was up for sale [...] there were spam sites wanted to make it a link farm, and a bunch of properties that would have really screwed things up" Yeah, that would've been terrible compared to what actually happened.

estacado 14y ago

The way I see it, what went wrong with Digg was the amount of influence "superstar" users had on the stories that make the front page. The fact that they kept and displayed the "ranking" of users just shows how this culture of superstardom is ingrained within Digg mechanics itself. It may not have effected the traffic or growth at the time, but it did affect the quality of stories highlighted. Digg knew its system was being gamed and I think that is what pushed them to make the changes they did on v4 (apart from the money), where publishers were given priority over individually submitted stories.