9 ms·

The New Digg Arrives Ahead Of Schedule

96 points by llambda 14y ago

zalew 14y ago
> According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of thousands per month” to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would be considered legacy technology by a modern startup. has anyone some details to expand on it?
- AznHisoka 14y ago
  why does it even need to keep on running? Geez, just keep open the submission process, crank up the ads, and turn off everything! Digg has no clue what passive income means. They should take a page from spammers.
  - zalew 14y ago
    frankly I never cared about digg at all, but I'm always interested on the technological aspect. this bit got me curious.
- Shank 14y ago
  I recall when Kevin Rose was interviewed prior to v4 launching, they were running the entire thing on Cassandra. When it launched, they spent the majority of the time attempting to scale it in a quick fashion - a process which probably involved buying lots of resources and attempting to scale as fast as possible. It was badly designed from the start, and was never really fixed.
  - achompas 14y ago
    Wait, does this mean Cassandra == "outdated" by a "modern startup's" standards? I know its a couple of years old (4, says Wikipedia), but...really?
    - SkyMarshal 14y ago
      That was Techcrunch's characterization of it, not a direct quote from Borthwick or anyone at Betaworks.
      - achompas 14y ago
        Good point--I was just wondering if anyone had a comment on that thought. Sounds ridiculous to me...
        duaneb 14y ago
        Reddit, Netflix, and Facebook all use Cassandra. I think Techcrunch may have A) misunderstood or B) been referring to archaic PHP code. EDIT: Actually, it looks like TC has a history of believing Cassandra = Bad for digg.com: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineering-door/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineeri...
        achompas 14y ago
        I was under the impression Facebook replaced Cassandra in their stack with HBase. Yes, I forgot about Netflix! Not only do they use it, but they've provided tons of excellent tools for it (Astyanax, Priam) and blog about it very frequently.
        duaneb 14y ago
        Yes; Facebook has since abandoned Cassandra.
    - Shank 14y ago
      It's not necessarily that, but when v4 launched, they experienced a giant problem with their infrastructure. Likely the "fix" was to increase performance versus fix the problem programatically. Hence their previous statements. Kevin's statement was in reference to them switching completely to NoSQL and not knowing how to scale it properly.
protomyth 14y ago
First, having to login with Facebook doesn't really make a lot of sense. Second, am I missing the comments on stories somewhere or is it just a website where links get voted on, but no discussion occurs?
- ABS 14y ago
  1) this is the first release, after only 6 weeks 2) they are working on comments more on their blog http://blog.digg.com/post/28441399381/welcome-to-digg-v1 http://blog.digg.com/post/28441399381/welcome-to-digg-v1
- fletchowns 14y ago
  To be fair, most of the stories on the front page of digg before this most recent redesign had 0 comments anyways, so they probably realized they could push out that feature a bit.
- ceslami 14y ago
  1) By using FB, at least initially, they can lower signup friction and get a good bit of social momentum. Especially if users are sharing their "diggs" publicly. Doesn't appeal to hackers, but it works when done tastefully. 2) Discussion on digg was always a bit janky. HN really spoils the idea of social links/comments because they are so high quality here, but when you're targeting the average person, its harder to control quality. Let people sound of on Twitter/FB, and you've created a new marketing vector without directly polluting the experience on your site.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
mike626 14y ago
I am not happy about needing to sign into Facebook and then having any story I digg showing up on my Facebook timeline. That's an overstep that will keep me off the site.
- omfg 14y ago
  While I haven't looked into this particular scenario. You used to be able to revoke individual permissions per app / site on FB. It's under Privacy > App & Sites, obviously it defaults to on as it's convenient for the site in question. An entirely different debate.
- jjrs11 14y ago
  I think for a lot of people, being able to keep a pseudonymous identity is one of the few things that differentiates sites like reddit and digg from Facebook and twitter in the first place. Most people I know aren't crazy about letting others know what their reddit username is, let alone slapping everything they do on their Facebook feed.
  - vidarh 14y ago
    Exactly. My id here is my first name and initial. Correlating my username here with my full name, which is unique worldwide, is easy. My Reddit id on the other hand does not directly tie to my name, and that's just how I like it. It's still fairly easy to find - I don't care if people who really want to figure it out, as I don't write anything I can't stand for. If I wanted true anonymity I'd take a lot of extra precautions. I just care that my Reddit comments don't show up on the first few pages of a Google search for my name, as it lets me not think as much about my "professional image". Putting it on Facebook is something I'd never let happen. There's a huge difference between being possible to find what I've written if you really care about it vs. it being showed in the face of my family, for example. And this is without being part of any controversial sub-reddits. There are plenty of sub-reddits or individual threads that are offensive enough or controversial enough that I'd imagine they'd die pretty quickly if people were forced connect their Reddit identities to anything that might be directly matched to their names.
- 14y ago
xSwag 14y ago
I guess Digg is aimed more towards general crowd now that it only allows for login with Facebook. In thier FAQ they mention it is to cut down on spam but something tells me we will never see User registration. What about people like me who do not have Facebook. I certainly do not want to make a Facebook account to use this service. Furthermore, there are a _lot_ of people who do not use it, why did they not consider this?
- facorreia 14y ago
  Maybe they'll just stick to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users, at least for now. The intersection of the sets of people that don't want a Facebook account and people that want a Digg account is probably small.
- untog 14y ago
  Furthermore, there are a _lot_ of people who do not use it, why did they not consider this? "A lot" is a very relative term. Non-Facebook users are probably in a minority in the kind of audience they're targeting. I think it's an interesting choice. I'm not going to say it's sensible just yet, but when they introduce comments it will be interesting to see if forcing real names brings the level of discussion up.
- Shank 14y ago
  Their FAQ specifically addresses this. "Using Facebook for account registration is a short-term solution that will seriously cut down on spam, while we take our time to develop more robust spam-filter technology. We know this isn’t ideal, so rest assured: we are working towards a more lasting solution."
mindstab 14y ago
So they lost the ability to comment and moved further away from the reddit/HN tight text view (which they used to look like and have been steadily moving away from) and now look like a messy news page. Is anyone else finding this new redesign even more irrelevant than ever? What does digg provide at all now? No discussion and a very messy hard way to even find anything.
- yuhong 14y ago
  The commenting will be added later.
  - mindstab 14y ago
    Let's say I were to redesign Ebay as a big picture listing site (ability to bid and buy, coming later) Would anyone consider this a ready to launch replacement? If they don't value commenting as one the of the most core features what hope do they really have? To me HN is more valuable for the comments then the aggregation. I often skip the article and just look at the comments. Digg cannot now compete with this and if this is their priorities: big gaudy pictures, voting, and distant third or less, commenting... well. good luck I guess but we have different priorities on what we were hoping for and expecting and need.
    - untog 14y ago
      I think that "launch" is a relative term here. I mean that in the sense that Betaworks have been entirely open about the process from the start, and are aware that 90% of their audience right now is curious techies like ourselves. I very much doubt that they'll be promoting it much. This is an alpha, or a beta, or whatever you want to call it.
    - ojbyrne 14y ago
      The original digg didn't have comments at launch either, they were added a couple of months after.
      - 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
petekp 14y ago
This looks very promising. Seems like it'd be a great place to catch up on top stories, sort of like Flipboard. Curious to see what they end up doing with commenting. The team behind this is clearly very skilled. Will be keeping an eye on this as it evolves.
rwhitman 14y ago
So they really did nuke the whole thing. There's no legacy content migration, none of the user DB is intact. It seriously was just a premium domain buy. Fascinating
- Shank 14y ago
  It's all still in their backend - they're making a tool to pull old data out. http://digg.com/archive http://digg.com/archive
- mcantelon 14y ago
  The 6 week "rewrite" did sound foolhardy. Now it turns out it wasn't a rewrite, it was a replacement (a significantly quicker thing to do).
jskopek 14y ago
I'm all in favor of rapid releases and MVP, but this seems like a step in the wrong direction. As many have pointed out, the site is missing many of the core features required to build a community. This seems like a great way to alienate the few remaining Digg loyalists
ojbyrne 14y ago
It seems to be a rebranding of News.me, rather than anything to do with digg.
adamokane 14y ago
I'm very interested to see what happens with this. I think they've made all the right moves so far since the acquisition and I love the transparency. They're going to try to stay true to their roots while also becoming "fast and thin", in their words. It also makes a ton of sense to have the algorithm factor in tweets, FB shares, and diggs. Nice. I don't know if it'll ultimately work, but it looks like a good start.
quotemstr 14y ago
Goddammit, I hate it when sites intercept middle-clicks. Middle click means "open in new tab", not "run some badly-written open-in-new-window javascript".
jmduke 14y ago
I'll say this -- this looks much much better than reddit or HN on my iPhone. But, as always, such sites' value comes more from their community than anything else.
ehynds 14y ago
Digging through the source reveals a konami easter egg. Unfortunately all it really does is break the page though.
steveplace 14y ago
This will test my theory that the success of a product launch is directly tied to how many HN users hate it.
- harlanlewis 14y ago
  Facetious and I'm sure you'll get all sorts of downvotes, but the biases of commentary groups is worth knowing.
- m0nastic 14y ago
  I'd actually been testing that theory for many months, and was all set to declare it victory when Groupon happened. I was sure that the level of negativity on the company leading up to the IPO would pretty much assure it's success. But I think folks have been proven to be mostly right about that (if not a little hyperbolically fatalistic).
  - Steko 14y ago
    The "Groupon is a giant Ponzi scheme" conventional wisdom slingers of HN haven't been proven right about anything.
fpp 14y ago
Seems like old user accounts wont work any-more - instead requesting to log in with a FB account - guys just forget it right away. but then "De mortuis nil nisi bonum" (Speak no ill of the dead)
smacktoward 14y ago
There's something about them calling it "Digg v1" that really annoys me. Digg version 1 was... the original Digg, no? I dunno what particular version of Digg this thing is, except that as a reboot of an existing property/brand it's obviously not version 1. It might be their version 1, but calling it "v1" in public makes it feel like the old Soviet pictures where the leaders who had fallen out of favor were airbrushed out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Sov...). "Nyet, Comrade! Commissar Rose was never in charge of this tractor plant!" It just feels really disrespectful to the original Digg team, at least to me.
- the1 14y ago
  original digg was v0. this is not lua
  - freehunter 14y ago
    And it then went on to several more version over the years, so even if it started at 0 (which is ridiculous, this is version numbers not arrays) it would still end up at more than v1.
- shaunxcode 14y ago
  I think they mean v1 as in not beta or mvp. Also I have to admit it's good! However it is a waiting game now to see what sort of community builds around it.
- xanados 14y ago
  It's a reboot of the franchise. Just like the new Star Trek movie wasn't called "Star Trek 11" but simply "Star Trek." It would be odd to keep the same version numbering scheme when they threw away the old system, no?
ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
Oh no, not that "Magazine Layout" crap. I get why designers choose it, they want to make the page look lively and balance content all over the place but it's terrible for readability. It breaks natural eye flow from left to right then top to bottom. With magazine style layouts, your eyes have to go all over the place to skim through the content and that just gets annoying. If they wanted to avoid looking like a blog but still keep the lively look and feel they could have tried a grid like layout where at least the stories are aligned horizontally in a straight line. The style itself is really nice, blocky and beautifully simple. This is how you redesign a content site, its elements are purposely made minimal, simple, and sterile so that the content stands out above everything else. The site disappears and the content takes the stage. Basically, it puts the spotlight on the performer rather than the stage. Also, the site's so lightweight that it just feels fast. Very few elements are begging for your eye's attention which is great, it allows the eyes to go straight for the image and title. Everything about the redesign is just so right, it's a shame they went for the magazine style layout. Either way, great redesign. It's won me over, and I will actually start returning to digg to see how things go over the next few months. This was a very nice rebirth, back to simple, back to content.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  The fundamental issue with the "magazine layout" is that it is completely pointless in a digital world. The reason why magazines are laid out the way they are is because there's a limit on space, so everything has to be crammed in wherever it'll fit. When you've got a website though, there are no such restrictions, so the focus should be on presenting content in the most orderly manner.
  - keithnoizu 14y ago
    well to be fair there is some constraint in how much of a site afresh impression is going to look at and the average screen size they will be using. The grid is a less applicable but there's still some advantages to displaying all of your important bits in a semi clean fashion on the landing page with out flowing to far in any direction.
- 14y ago
pacomerh 14y ago
The right column is the one that is confusing, looks like its a place for top news or something, however it's just another column with the same relevance, this is a little weird, just content accumulated with no context. Also, why is there no bury button on the home page, having only [digg] = [like] is boring. Overall this looks like a wordpress theme for a magazine, very tired design. I would expect more from a digg redesign.
nostromo 14y ago
Wow, Facebook required for sign up. Did they really throw away all of their user accounts?
twodayslate 14y ago
I have a facebook account but I have "deactivated" it (not deleted). I cannot use the new digg. The facebook popup shows up and then immediately disappears. This is frustrating.
lwat 14y ago
Looks hot but it's pretty pointless without commenting
SkyMarshal 14y ago
>According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of thousands per month” to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would be considered legacy technology by a modern startup. Because of this, the new Digg team decided to throw away virtually all of the old underpinning of the site in favor of a fresh start. Borthwick wants to rebuild the company and to do so, he says, it’s important to turn it back into startup mode and develop a completely new and modern platform to develop the new Digg on. Anyone know the tech stack they're using? Don't see anything specific on their website (blog, about, careers).
- Johngibb 14y ago
  I saw an nginx error page one of the times I hit the homepage, fwiw
- duaneb 14y ago
  It began with PHP - I'm not sure if it was ever rewritten. However, by "the end" they were scaling with cassandra, but mostly they were throwing more hardware and people at it. Note that this is from a hazy memory.
- kintamanimatt 14y ago
  Appears they're using Python/Tornado on Amazon EC2. No idea what DB they're using.
jordanb 14y ago
The cost of running the site seems like a red herring. Reddit is proof that there's no technical reason why a community news site can't be run on a fraction of the cost of Digg. The real lead here is that Digg is ceding that market entirely to Reddit. The new Digg looks more like a competitor to the Huffington Post. To be honest, I think there might just be a business there. Huffpo serves a particular market niche: predominately liberal female city dwellers and it strikes me that it may be profitable to deliver the same product to a different niche.
madprops 14y ago
I think it looks very clean, very nice. I also think making it a place to find interesting content to share in people's social networks, were the majority of conversations are happening, instead of making people comment in-site, was a smart move.
Kilimanjaro 14y ago
Oh god no, facebook login no. I bet my balls they will turn on facebook comments in a couple of weeks too. Sorry digg, me no coming back.
austenallred 14y ago
I like that you can submit by tweeting"[url] tip @digg", that seems pretty slick. Where do they get the pictures for each piece of content? Is it automatically generated from the site, or do they go through manually for stuff that reaches the front page?
JeanTouman 14y ago
Does this mean it will also fail ahead of schedule?
makecheck 14y ago
The cleaner look isn't bad but it is impossible to resize the text, even when attempting manual zooming. This is certainly not the first site to be conceited about text size but come on: this is a site for reading things and who knows better than the user what font size will be comfortable for doing that? Also, I recall something in their blog about designing "for 2012" and focusing on "the user", so where exactly does screwed-up layout fit in to those goals?
grandpoobah 14y ago
This new Digg is utter crap. What a waste of the Digg name. I have no words to express just how disappointed I am.
jameszol 14y ago
I'm having a hard time trying to find something that I like about the new Digg v1. It feels "meh" to me so far. The layout of the content makes it hard for me to digest...I already hope there is a redesign when v2 is launched.
dmix 14y ago
Well, I don't think any of us were expecting much and it met that expectation succinctly.

96 points by llambda 14y ago

zalew 14y ago

AznHisoka 14y ago
why does it even need to keep on running? Geez, just keep open the submission process, crank up the ads, and turn off everything! Digg has no clue what passive income means. They should take a page from spammers.
- zalew 14y ago
  frankly I never cared about digg at all, but I'm always interested on the technological aspect. this bit got me curious.
Shank 14y ago
I recall when Kevin Rose was interviewed prior to v4 launching, they were running the entire thing on Cassandra. When it launched, they spent the majority of the time attempting to scale it in a quick fashion - a process which probably involved buying lots of resources and attempting to scale as fast as possible. It was badly designed from the start, and was never really fixed.
- achompas 14y ago
  Wait, does this mean Cassandra == "outdated" by a "modern startup's" standards? I know its a couple of years old (4, says Wikipedia), but...really?
  - SkyMarshal 14y ago
    That was Techcrunch's characterization of it, not a direct quote from Borthwick or anyone at Betaworks.
    - achompas 14y ago
      Good point--I was just wondering if anyone had a comment on that thought. Sounds ridiculous to me...
      - duaneb 14y ago
        Reddit, Netflix, and Facebook all use Cassandra. I think Techcrunch may have A) misunderstood or B) been referring to archaic PHP code. EDIT: Actually, it looks like TC has a history of believing Cassandra = Bad for digg.com: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineering-door/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineeri...
        achompas 14y ago
        I was under the impression Facebook replaced Cassandra in their stack with HBase. Yes, I forgot about Netflix! Not only do they use it, but they've provided tons of excellent tools for it (Astyanax, Priam) and blog about it very frequently.
        duaneb 14y ago
        Yes; Facebook has since abandoned Cassandra.
  - Shank 14y ago
    It's not necessarily that, but when v4 launched, they experienced a giant problem with their infrastructure. Likely the "fix" was to increase performance versus fix the problem programatically. Hence their previous statements. Kevin's statement was in reference to them switching completely to NoSQL and not knowing how to scale it properly.

First, having to login with Facebook doesn't really make a lot of sense. Second, am I missing the comments on stories somewhere or is it just a website where links get voted on, but no discussion occurs?

ABS 14y ago
1) this is the first release, after only 6 weeks 2) they are working on comments more on their blog http://blog.digg.com/post/28441399381/welcome-to-digg-v1 http://blog.digg.com/post/28441399381/welcome-to-digg-v1
fletchowns 14y ago
To be fair, most of the stories on the front page of digg before this most recent redesign had 0 comments anyways, so they probably realized they could push out that feature a bit.
ceslami 14y ago
1) By using FB, at least initially, they can lower signup friction and get a good bit of social momentum. Especially if users are sharing their "diggs" publicly. Doesn't appeal to hackers, but it works when done tastefully. 2) Discussion on digg was always a bit janky. HN really spoils the idea of social links/comments because they are so high quality here, but when you're targeting the average person, its harder to control quality. Let people sound of on Twitter/FB, and you've created a new marketing vector without directly polluting the experience on your site.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

mike626 14y ago

I am not happy about needing to sign into Facebook and then having any story I digg showing up on my Facebook timeline. That's an overstep that will keep me off the site.

omfg 14y ago
While I haven't looked into this particular scenario. You used to be able to revoke individual permissions per app / site on FB. It's under Privacy > App & Sites, obviously it defaults to on as it's convenient for the site in question. An entirely different debate.
jjrs11 14y ago
I think for a lot of people, being able to keep a pseudonymous identity is one of the few things that differentiates sites like reddit and digg from Facebook and twitter in the first place. Most people I know aren't crazy about letting others know what their reddit username is, let alone slapping everything they do on their Facebook feed.
- vidarh 14y ago
  Exactly. My id here is my first name and initial. Correlating my username here with my full name, which is unique worldwide, is easy. My Reddit id on the other hand does not directly tie to my name, and that's just how I like it. It's still fairly easy to find - I don't care if people who really want to figure it out, as I don't write anything I can't stand for. If I wanted true anonymity I'd take a lot of extra precautions. I just care that my Reddit comments don't show up on the first few pages of a Google search for my name, as it lets me not think as much about my "professional image". Putting it on Facebook is something I'd never let happen. There's a huge difference between being possible to find what I've written if you really care about it vs. it being showed in the face of my family, for example. And this is without being part of any controversial sub-reddits. There are plenty of sub-reddits or individual threads that are offensive enough or controversial enough that I'd imagine they'd die pretty quickly if people were forced connect their Reddit identities to anything that might be directly matched to their names.
14y ago

xSwag 14y ago

I guess Digg is aimed more towards general crowd now that it only allows for login with Facebook. In thier FAQ they mention it is to cut down on spam but something tells me we will never see User registration. What about people like me who do not have Facebook. I certainly do not want to make a Facebook account to use this service. Furthermore, there are a _lot_ of people who do not use it, why did they not consider this?

facorreia 14y ago
Maybe they'll just stick to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users, at least for now. The intersection of the sets of people that don't want a Facebook account and people that want a Digg account is probably small.
untog 14y ago
Furthermore, there are a _lot_ of people who do not use it, why did they not consider this? "A lot" is a very relative term. Non-Facebook users are probably in a minority in the kind of audience they're targeting. I think it's an interesting choice. I'm not going to say it's sensible just yet, but when they introduce comments it will be interesting to see if forcing real names brings the level of discussion up.
Shank 14y ago
Their FAQ specifically addresses this. "Using Facebook for account registration is a short-term solution that will seriously cut down on spam, while we take our time to develop more robust spam-filter technology. We know this isn’t ideal, so rest assured: we are working towards a more lasting solution."

mindstab 14y ago

So they lost the ability to comment and moved further away from the reddit/HN tight text view (which they used to look like and have been steadily moving away from) and now look like a messy news page. Is anyone else finding this new redesign even more irrelevant than ever? What does digg provide at all now? No discussion and a very messy hard way to even find anything.

yuhong 14y ago
The commenting will be added later.
- mindstab 14y ago
  Let's say I were to redesign Ebay as a big picture listing site (ability to bid and buy, coming later) Would anyone consider this a ready to launch replacement? If they don't value commenting as one the of the most core features what hope do they really have? To me HN is more valuable for the comments then the aggregation. I often skip the article and just look at the comments. Digg cannot now compete with this and if this is their priorities: big gaudy pictures, voting, and distant third or less, commenting... well. good luck I guess but we have different priorities on what we were hoping for and expecting and need.
  - untog 14y ago
    I think that "launch" is a relative term here. I mean that in the sense that Betaworks have been entirely open about the process from the start, and are aware that 90% of their audience right now is curious techies like ourselves. I very much doubt that they'll be promoting it much. This is an alpha, or a beta, or whatever you want to call it.
  - ojbyrne 14y ago
    The original digg didn't have comments at launch either, they were added a couple of months after.
    - 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

petekp 14y ago

This looks very promising. Seems like it'd be a great place to catch up on top stories, sort of like Flipboard. Curious to see what they end up doing with commenting. The team behind this is clearly very skilled. Will be keeping an eye on this as it evolves.

rwhitman 14y ago

So they really did nuke the whole thing. There's no legacy content migration, none of the user DB is intact. It seriously was just a premium domain buy. Fascinating

Shank 14y ago
It's all still in their backend - they're making a tool to pull old data out. http://digg.com/archive http://digg.com/archive
mcantelon 14y ago
The 6 week "rewrite" did sound foolhardy. Now it turns out it wasn't a rewrite, it was a replacement (a significantly quicker thing to do).

jskopek 14y ago

I'm all in favor of rapid releases and MVP, but this seems like a step in the wrong direction. As many have pointed out, the site is missing many of the core features required to build a community. This seems like a great way to alienate the few remaining Digg loyalists

ojbyrne 14y ago

It seems to be a rebranding of News.me, rather than anything to do with digg.

adamokane 14y ago

I'm very interested to see what happens with this. I think they've made all the right moves so far since the acquisition and I love the transparency. They're going to try to stay true to their roots while also becoming "fast and thin", in their words. It also makes a ton of sense to have the algorithm factor in tweets, FB shares, and diggs. Nice. I don't know if it'll ultimately work, but it looks like a good start.

quotemstr 14y ago

Goddammit, I hate it when sites intercept middle-clicks. Middle click means "open in new tab", not "run some badly-written open-in-new-window javascript".

jmduke 14y ago

I'll say this -- this looks much much better than reddit or HN on my iPhone. But, as always, such sites' value comes more from their community than anything else.

ehynds 14y ago

Digging through the source reveals a konami easter egg. Unfortunately all it really does is break the page though.

steveplace 14y ago

This will test my theory that the success of a product launch is directly tied to how many HN users hate it.

harlanlewis 14y ago
Facetious and I'm sure you'll get all sorts of downvotes, but the biases of commentary groups is worth knowing.
m0nastic 14y ago
I'd actually been testing that theory for many months, and was all set to declare it victory when Groupon happened. I was sure that the level of negativity on the company leading up to the IPO would pretty much assure it's success. But I think folks have been proven to be mostly right about that (if not a little hyperbolically fatalistic).
- Steko 14y ago
  The "Groupon is a giant Ponzi scheme" conventional wisdom slingers of HN haven't been proven right about anything.

fpp 14y ago

Seems like old user accounts wont work any-more - instead requesting to log in with a FB account - guys just forget it right away. but then "De mortuis nil nisi bonum" (Speak no ill of the dead)

smacktoward 14y ago

There's something about them calling it "Digg v1" that really annoys me. Digg version 1 was... the original Digg, no? I dunno what particular version of Digg this thing is, except that as a reboot of an existing property/brand it's obviously not version 1. It might be their version 1, but calling it "v1" in public makes it feel like the old Soviet pictures where the leaders who had fallen out of favor were airbrushed out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Sov...). "Nyet, Comrade! Commissar Rose was never in charge of this tractor plant!" It just feels really disrespectful to the original Digg team, at least to me.

the1 14y ago
original digg was v0. this is not lua
- freehunter 14y ago
  And it then went on to several more version over the years, so even if it started at 0 (which is ridiculous, this is version numbers not arrays) it would still end up at more than v1.
shaunxcode 14y ago
I think they mean v1 as in not beta or mvp. Also I have to admit it's good! However it is a waiting game now to see what sort of community builds around it.
xanados 14y ago
It's a reboot of the franchise. Just like the new Star Trek movie wasn't called "Star Trek 11" but simply "Star Trek." It would be odd to keep the same version numbering scheme when they threw away the old system, no?

ChrisNorstrom 14y ago

Oh no, not that "Magazine Layout" crap. I get why designers choose it, they want to make the page look lively and balance content all over the place but it's terrible for readability. It breaks natural eye flow from left to right then top to bottom. With magazine style layouts, your eyes have to go all over the place to skim through the content and that just gets annoying. If they wanted to avoid looking like a blog but still keep the lively look and feel they could have tried a grid like layout where at least the stories are aligned horizontally in a straight line. The style itself is really nice, blocky and beautifully simple. This is how you redesign a content site, its elements are purposely made minimal, simple, and sterile so that the content stands out above everything else. The site disappears and the content takes the stage. Basically, it puts the spotlight on the performer rather than the stage. Also, the site's so lightweight that it just feels fast. Very few elements are begging for your eye's attention which is great, it allows the eyes to go straight for the image and title. Everything about the redesign is just so right, it's a shame they went for the magazine style layout. Either way, great redesign. It's won me over, and I will actually start returning to digg to see how things go over the next few months. This was a very nice rebirth, back to simple, back to content.

w1ntermute 14y ago
The fundamental issue with the "magazine layout" is that it is completely pointless in a digital world. The reason why magazines are laid out the way they are is because there's a limit on space, so everything has to be crammed in wherever it'll fit. When you've got a website though, there are no such restrictions, so the focus should be on presenting content in the most orderly manner.
- keithnoizu 14y ago
  well to be fair there is some constraint in how much of a site afresh impression is going to look at and the average screen size they will be using. The grid is a less applicable but there's still some advantages to displaying all of your important bits in a semi clean fashion on the landing page with out flowing to far in any direction.
14y ago

pacomerh 14y ago

The right column is the one that is confusing, looks like its a place for top news or something, however it's just another column with the same relevance, this is a little weird, just content accumulated with no context. Also, why is there no bury button on the home page, having only [digg] = [like] is boring. Overall this looks like a wordpress theme for a magazine, very tired design. I would expect more from a digg redesign.

nostromo 14y ago

Wow, Facebook required for sign up. Did they really throw away all of their user accounts?

twodayslate 14y ago

I have a facebook account but I have "deactivated" it (not deleted). I cannot use the new digg. The facebook popup shows up and then immediately disappears. This is frustrating.

lwat 14y ago

Looks hot but it's pretty pointless without commenting

SkyMarshal 14y ago

>According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of thousands per month” to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would be considered legacy technology by a modern startup. Because of this, the new Digg team decided to throw away virtually all of the old underpinning of the site in favor of a fresh start. Borthwick wants to rebuild the company and to do so, he says, it’s important to turn it back into startup mode and develop a completely new and modern platform to develop the new Digg on. Anyone know the tech stack they're using? Don't see anything specific on their website (blog, about, careers).

Johngibb 14y ago
I saw an nginx error page one of the times I hit the homepage, fwiw
duaneb 14y ago
It began with PHP - I'm not sure if it was ever rewritten. However, by "the end" they were scaling with cassandra, but mostly they were throwing more hardware and people at it. Note that this is from a hazy memory.
kintamanimatt 14y ago
Appears they're using Python/Tornado on Amazon EC2. No idea what DB they're using.

jordanb 14y ago

The cost of running the site seems like a red herring. Reddit is proof that there's no technical reason why a community news site can't be run on a fraction of the cost of Digg. The real lead here is that Digg is ceding that market entirely to Reddit. The new Digg looks more like a competitor to the Huffington Post. To be honest, I think there might just be a business there. Huffpo serves a particular market niche: predominately liberal female city dwellers and it strikes me that it may be profitable to deliver the same product to a different niche.

madprops 14y ago

I think it looks very clean, very nice. I also think making it a place to find interesting content to share in people's social networks, were the majority of conversations are happening, instead of making people comment in-site, was a smart move.

Kilimanjaro 14y ago

Oh god no, facebook login no. I bet my balls they will turn on facebook comments in a couple of weeks too. Sorry digg, me no coming back.

austenallred 14y ago

I like that you can submit by tweeting"[url] tip @digg", that seems pretty slick. Where do they get the pictures for each piece of content? Is it automatically generated from the site, or do they go through manually for stuff that reaches the front page?

JeanTouman 14y ago

Does this mean it will also fail ahead of schedule?

makecheck 14y ago

The cleaner look isn't bad but it is impossible to resize the text, even when attempting manual zooming. This is certainly not the first site to be conceited about text size but come on: this is a site for reading things and who knows better than the user what font size will be comfortable for doing that? Also, I recall something in their blog about designing "for 2012" and focusing on "the user", so where exactly does screwed-up layout fit in to those goals?

grandpoobah 14y ago

This new Digg is utter crap. What a waste of the Digg name. I have no words to express just how disappointed I am.

jameszol 14y ago

I'm having a hard time trying to find something that I like about the new Digg v1. It feels "meh" to me so far. The layout of the content makes it hard for me to digest...I already hope there is a redesign when v2 is launched.

dmix 14y ago

Well, I don't think any of us were expecting much and it met that expectation succinctly.