
How the Digg team was acquihired - stuartmemo
https://lethain.com//digg-acquihire/
======
sys_64738
Digg is a classic example of a webpage getting a working model right, totally
by accident. This happens quite a lot in that they cobble something together
and it got trajectory. Their downfall is thinking they actually knew what they
were doing and therein lies their problem. They had no clue and they changed
it causing the whole thing to crater.

The moral here is don't change anything. Ever.

~~~
thejosh
And reddit is doing the new thing. Their new design caused me to leave, even
their "old." subdomain is pretty bad.

Didn't really need it in my life anyway.

~~~
doc_gunthrop
But _old.reddit.com_ is the same as reddit before they implemented the bloated
redesign.

~~~
takeda
it constantly tries to make you to the new page. I actually have an extension
to keep me on old.reddit.com. TBH I really miss Usenet. That functionality is
what essentially I'm trying to get from them.

~~~
atombender
It's an account setting -- you can completely opt out of the new version. I
use Reddit every day, and have never been sent to the new version by mistake.

Unfortunately, if you use the old version, you will also not have access to
the newest mod tools, including a lot of sub settings. But the old version
works fine for reading and commenting.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've set my preference to old numerous times. That setting seems to either
revert or disappear entirely / appear as a new setting.

I'm constantly directed to www.

That's obvious as I've disabled JS for the domain, and so get an empty page
with a spinner.

It's a clusterfsck.

~~~
toyg
It’s a cookie, and it’s linked to your login session. If you log out or clear
cookies, or use incognito mode, it will revert to new by default. I used to
have the same issue until I figured that out. Now I just have a dedicated
container for it in Firefox and all is well.

I would have left reddit a long time ago if I were forced to use the terrible
new UI. The fact that they still keep it around, years later, is a telling
sign. When you are so scared of your own decisions, you know you messed up.

~~~
dredmorbius
This occurs consistently whilst logged in.

------
processing
As I remember pre the redesign of the Digg front page, it was controlled by
"Diggers" who were being paid by blogs and brands for the traffic (Digg.com
could deliver 100k>1m+ visitors a post with the right content angles). The
redesign was to take back control of the homepage results and be able to
charge brands for the exposure. Once the users realised they had little sway
in getting a post to the front page they left.

~~~
zyang
I remember the days when mr babyman and friends controlled the digg front page
and all the drama that followed. It was a perfect example of an over
aggressive parasite killing the host. Reddit solved it by creating sub-
reddits. HN solved it with clear rules and diligent mod work.

~~~
CoughlinJ
Reddit solved nothing. As far as I know there's little-to-no transparency in
each subreddits moderation or content approval process. In fact, I would go so
far as to say that it is a glaring issue with that platform.

~~~
eps
You don't like a sub, you don't sub to the sub.

The frontpage you see is the one that you compose yourself, that's _the_ thing
what makes reddit work.

~~~
Traster
This isn't true for a number of reasons. Firstly, the existence of a sub-
reddit on a topic makes it almost impossible for a different sub-reddit for
the same subject to gain traction. So, sure you can disagree with how
/r/politics or /r/motorcycles moderates their subs, but the result is you
don't get to read about motorcycles or US politics on reddit. The barrier to
creating an alternative is almost infinitely high. I'm struggling to think of
any sub-reddits that have been replaced by alternatives on the same subject.

So you end up with a tiny number of redditors who are the moderators for the
largest sub-reddits. There is practically no turn over in these people, they
have functionally complete autonomy over the vast majority of the traffic on
the site, and they quite literally can choose to ban individual websites. What
makes you think that companies were paying for digg power users to be friendly
but the exact same class of users at reddit aren't getting the same treatment?

And in reality, what the majority of people see on the frontpage is the
frontpage filled with the default sub-reddits. Which, again, are entirely at
the discretion of handful of moderators who have 0 accountability.

~~~
sangnoir
> And in reality, what the majority of people see on the frontpage is the
> frontpage filled with the default sub-reddits.

This is a fair point. I'd argue that there is one single frontpage for reddit;
each signed-in user has their own and this raises the cost of astroturfing
with the same reach (%) as the universal Digg frontpage. Mods get their own
fiefdoms in subreddits, but they don't wield the kind of power mr babyman had
over the overall frontpage. This balkanization means disgruntled users are
likely to leave _subreddits_ , but stay on reddit itself, or if sufficiently
motivated, create a competing subreddit (see the countless _/ r/X_ vs _/
r/true-X_ for any given X)

------
badfrog
What's the benefit for an average software engineer in going along with the
acquihire rather than looking for a completely new job?

~~~
ankut04
Benefits are for the founders. For employees, its just another day. No need to
go for job hunting immediately.

~~~
Traster
It's almost never going to be just another day. For a start, the acquiring
company is almost certainly going to immediately stuff fucking with your
benefits. Your projects are incredibly unlikely to survive- so if you care
about what you're working on, forget it. If your project does survive be ready
for a massive influx of new people all of whom have their own ideas of why the
acquisition happened and what your project was for. Oh and because acquihires
almost always happen where the acquiring company is a behemoth you're going to
subsumed into a massive bureaucracy that is clearly not what you signed up for
in your original job.

------
aantix
>Because acquihires are “star” oriented, if you’re a senior

>leaders who doesn’t explicitly refuse to move forward,

>pressure will converge on you from all sides: investors, the

>team wanting to return to stable employment, and the non-

>participating leadership team who all want you to commit so

>they can move on to new things for themselves.

That's not pressure, that's leverage. Demand a better deal and let them know
you're prepared to walk and sink the ship.

~~~
redis_mlc
> that's leverage.

Yup, when Pixar went public, Jobs decided to keep 100% of the shares. (You
could argue that he deserved it, since he spent the majority of his fortune on
Pixar and Next.)

So his 4 top managers threatened to quit and derail the IPO.

So they got shares, but no other employees did.

~~~
aantix
Totally the right move.

I’ve been through an acquisition. Everyone is jockeying for position and if
you’re not, unless you’re really good friends with the founder, you will be
exploited. As an engineer, they want you to stay on to increase the value of
the deal. If you’re a star on the team, they absolutely need you to stay on
for the deal to go through.

All of those extra hours, nights, weekends, that made you the go-to dev, pays
off with this piece of leverage.

Use it. Say it loudly that you’re willing to sink the deal for everyone else
impress your demands are met.

If they let you go, you never had any leverage to begin with. But if they
listen closely to your demands, you’re right where you should be.

Do not think for a second that any of the founders, managers or other devs
have your best interests in mind.

------
ProAm
It's funny because Im now back to checking out DIgg daily. I find it much more
enjoyable than Reddit these days.

~~~
rb808
Often it seems Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Google News, FB, even local newspapers
are just are recycling the same content.

~~~
ProAm
This is because no one pays for journalism anymore.

------
redis_mlc
I'd like to know more about why a failing news site had 2 data scientists on
the payroll.

~~~
Angostura
I remember Digg Labs produced some really cool animated real-time
visualisations of stories on the site.

A little Googling suggests that they were collaborations. But I wonder if the
data scientists were also involved

[http://v1.stamen.com/clients/digg.html](http://v1.stamen.com/clients/digg.html)
[http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=585](http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=585)

~~~
synack
No, the Stamen work happened before we had any data scientists on payroll.

Edit: We _did_ have an R&D team that did things that might today be considered
data science, but at the time they were mostly focused on documenting and
optimizing the Digg "algorithm"

------
franciscop
I'm curious about this "everyone must sign" contract mentioned. Since
employment is not mandatory, what is stopping the author or anyone from
signing and then walking away after 1 day working there?

~~~
jm4
There is usually some form of compensation attached to it that must be
returned if the employee doesn’t satisfy their obligations or is deferred so
that the employee is incentivized to stay at least that long. You can quit if
you really want to, but you might not want to return the lump sum signing
bonus you received a few months ago. Or you decide to stick it out for a year
at which point you receive stock.

------
mtmail
> our starting point was far less: 200 DAU.

Digg currently, or recently, was down to 200 daily active users? I knew they
lost a lot of users but that sounds like they lost everybody.

~~~
lethain
Sorry, I think that sentence was a bit unclear. What it meant to convey is
that we had 200 daily active _Facebook_ uniques, essentially that very few
folks used FB to connect to Digg.

------
echelon
Does anyone see the same fate happening to Reddit? Or are they too big and too
entrenched at this point?

~~~
mikepurvis
One thing that really made reddit different from the other communities that
were a thing in its early days was the insistence on wholly-separate
subreddits rather than the various overlapping tag schemes which were trendy
at the time on delicious, fark, digg, LJ, etc.

I don't know if spez and kn0thing had some special insight about this, but my
experience with it over the long term has been that you can be subbed to a few
reddits for your preferred niche interests, and enjoy almost complete
isolation from whatever toxicity is going on over in r/politics or wherever
else (barring the occasional bit of brigading, which is basically just a mess
for the smaller-community mods to clean up).

So there's clearly a large number of mainline users who basically just read
whatever reddits are default on the logged-out homepage. But I think there's
also a super long tail of users who don't read those at all, and my hunch is
that it's that long tail of users who have probably sustained the site over
the long term, and will continue to give it a lot of resiliency going forward.

~~~
kick
The three reddit founders didn't have special insight initially: for years,
reddit had no subreddits. Those came later as a sort of necessity.

~~~
mikepurvis
Per
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit#Full_timeli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit#Full_timeline),
the site launched in 2005, and from pretty early on there were a handful of
centrally-managed ones like science, programming, etc, with the option to
create arbitrary ones coming in 2008.

So _technically_ "years", but those were the very early days.

------
toohotatopic
What's the leverage the old company has over its engineers when negotiating an
acquihire? Why does the new company not approach the lead engineer and the
selected employees directly?

~~~
rbanffy
Non-competes, probably, are the easy way. Accusing the potential acquirer of
acting in bad faith also happens.

Also, a loyal and cohesive team can do the "we go together or we don't go"
move.

~~~
toohotatopic
I am not fully convinced.

That cohesive team, why would it make money for the old company and its
investors? That signing bonus can be split entirely among themselves.

Non-competes are not allowed in California. And in any other location, the
team can wait it out because the company most likely ceases existing.

------
caseyf7
Digg was losing so much money and required so much infrastructure to run at
the end. I wonder if the team at the time could’ve done a complete restart. I
think it required a new team without the history and loyalty to old decisions
to move forward. Betaworks was able to right the ship, but it was too late,
the world had moved on.

~~~
SethMurphy
Yes, the fall of the original Digg happened long ago.

[https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-acquires-
digg/](https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-acquires-digg/)

At the time Digg was acquired in name only. The team had a short period to
replace the then current (and very expensive) infrastructure and hijack all
traffic. They did a pretty awesome tech job of moving to AWS and stopping the
bleeding from the then in place bare metal setup. I remember a tech talk where
they spoke of the money they saved from moving to AWS, it was substantial and
allowed them the resources to try to save the product. Since then it was a re-
birthed startup with a new team that had quite a long runway IMHO.

~~~
panpanna
Clicked on your link... that Verizon Media privacy page is a nightmare. And
then it fails to load the article...

Do you have any more information about the move to aws and why that was
cheaper than their old setup?

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mattbillenstein
Thanks for writing these stories up - great examples of how the earlier days
were the wild west - we were all code cowboys, and it all lead to spectacular
failures at times.

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stazz1
Can you even submit to Digg anymore? The basic functionality is broken and
it's unclear why the site is floundering? Are you serious?

