
Digg v4's Problems are not Technical - rkalla
http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/digg-v4-troubles-are-symptom-of-a-bigger-problem/
======
jackolas
"TC had an interesting story on the reaction from Digg employees who found out
that John Quinn was being fired via TechCrunch and not from their internal
team members. That is insulting and alienating, but it also says a lot about
Digg and how that team is running right now."

Damn.

------
jbellis
Two Digg engineers have said on Quora that Cassandra in particular is not the
problem ([http://www.quora.com/Is-Cassandra-to-blame-for-
Digg-v4s-tech...](http://www.quora.com/Is-Cassandra-to-blame-for-
Digg-v4s-technical-failures))

"The whole 'Cassandra to blame' thing is 100% a result of folks clinging on to
the NoSQL vs SQL thing. It's a red herring.

"The new version of Digg has a whole new architecture with a bunch of
technologies involved. Problem is, over the last few month or so the only
technological change we mentioned (blogged about etc) was Cassandra. That made
it pretty easy for folks to cling on to it as the 'problem.'

~~~
houseabsolute
It may not only be Cassandra, but it would not surprise me to find that the
reason the VP was let go was because he oversold some architecture or
combination of architectures as a panacea. When everyone else found out that
Cassandra + whatever else wasn't going to be the magic bullet after all,
someone's head needed to roll.

------
staunch
The story of Digg is yet another cautionary tale about the "get big fast"
approach.

\+ Digg has 500 servers in two private datacenters. Reddit has dozens on EC2.

\+ Digg has ~100 employees. Reddit has a half dozen.

\+ Digg took $40M. Reddit took less than $1M.

Everything we're seeing now the result of the decision to take this path.
Half-hearted attempts to resurrect the dying beast are predictable, as is the
drama and finger pointing.

It's very unlikely anyone could have saved Digg. Kevin just walked in a
situation in which he was setup for failure. Even if he had picked the perfect
strategy there's no way he would have the time and support to prove it.

~~~
whakojacko
As of 10 months ago, reddit had 218 EC2 instances (no clue what size). See
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a2zte/i_run_reddits_se...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a2zte/i_run_reddits_servers_and_do_a_bunch_of_other/)
Not trying to argue with your overall point though-reddit has definitely run
much leaner.

edit: I stand corrected, thats just 218 virtual processors.

~~~
varaon
218 _virtual processors_

Actual numbers: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454369>

    
    
      25 c1.xlarge
      26 m1.large
      22 m1.xlarge

------
ojbyrne
"As one commenter quipped, if Twitter had fired engineers because of rocky
launches and questionable code in the first few months of getting popular,
there would be no one working at the company. (Ha!)"

I'm of mixed feelings about that bit (there was questionable code, but the
launches were pretty smooth given the lack of hardware), but it's pretty
obvious the person doesn't know the history of the site. But mostly that's
because the PR team worked really hard to make sure people didn't.

The first 2 years were amazing. Digg is now six years old, Kevin has taken 7
digit figures "off the table," there's no question that this launch was
unacceptable from so many perspectives. They just fired the wrong person.

~~~
enjo
I'm not sure I agree. Clearly Digg was having some kind of monetization issue.
This whole episode might be pretty calculated really. They had to know those
changes where going to cause general outrage. They had to think that the
benefit would outweigh that.

In the end they might add tremendous value.

What they didn't count on was the site taking a huge step back in terms of
reliability.

~~~
ojbyrne
I'm not sure which part of my comment you disagree with. But the monetization
issue is (in my opinion) due to Kevin and Jay taking money off the table, and
spending much of their time drawing digg salaries while building other
businesses (revision3, pownce, wefollow, fflick). If they'd devoted 100% of
their time to digg there wouldn't be a monetization issue.

~~~
enjo
I took "off the table" to imply that they had decreased the companies value
with Digg V4 in the order of 7 figures. I misunderstood.

------
gamble
Digg's trouble illustrates how the size of a site's audience isn't as
important to the bottom line as their quality. (From a marketeer's point-of-
view) Digg, reddit, even Facebook have trouble turning a profit despite
receiving a huge number of visitors. It's a very significant change from the
size-uber-alles orientation of the traditional media.

~~~
konad
Where to you get the idea that FB isn't profitable ?

2010 at least $1bn in revenue - <http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/03/facebook-
revenue-2010/>

2009 $700m in revenue -
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/21/sources_say_facebook...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/21/sources_say_facebook_turned_2009_profit/)

~~~
gamble
I didn't say that they weren't profitable. I said they made very little profit
considering that they have an enormous audience. A substantial chunk of the
planet frequents Facebook, yet people still argue whether they turn a profit.
That says something about the value of large audiences.

------
moultano
It looks to me like digg has essentially collapsed. Have you ever seen a front
page there with so few comments per post? Each is <50.

------
planckscnst
The author mentions users leaving because Digg has become "publisher
dominated". I haven't dived in yet, but based on the descriptions, it sounds
much less publisher dominated to me, especially if you consider MrBabyMan &
Co. to be publishers where Digg is their outlet. I'm really looking forward to
finding Digg friends that are more like the people here on HN so that they
might have more influence on which stories I see. I'd like to see Digg become
an effective source of interesting links again instead of the incrediby base
thing it has become.

------
formerpoweruser
Obvious throwaway account.

As a former digg "power user" this is my take on the recent change and why I
think is the only thing that will save digg.

I have been using digg since almost the beginning. At first I was using it for
the same reason almost everyone way using digg at that time, for tech news and
discussions. It might be very had to believe now, but once upon a time digg
used to have very engaged group of users with thoughtful and knowledgeable
comments, a lot like HN and some smaller sub-reddits on reddit. Digg was truly
powered by the users with very little if any influence. It was a lot of fun
and very addictive.

I think it was during v2 that they made some questionable choices by adding
friends feature (I could be wrong, it could have been there before that) and
"fudging" with the frontpage algo where instead of stories hitting the
frontpage because of the interest on stories, they soft-limited on the number
of stories-per-category could hit the frontpage. The idea was to "diversify"
the site. Which in the business sense is not a bad idea, you obviously want
more people to come to your site not only people who are interested in
technology, but the implementation was a sham.

This had 2 negative effects:

\- People who are passionate about technology and also the core majority of
the digg users lost interest and left or at least started using digg less. You
could really tell by the quality of the comments.

\- It opened the flood gates for other non-tech sites who are now interested
to get their site on digg frontpage. Getting on digg FP is profitable and also
good for SEO, the amount of quality link-back you get after hitting the FP is
crazy. Since the majority of the blogosphere is everyone quoting/rehashing
everyone else with little original content. If you could get your original
content to digg FP other related site/blog would pick it up and link back at
you. Before you had to work your ass off to get high quality link back, now
all you had to do was get on digg frontpage, which wasn't very difficult
because of the half-assed "community" feature they added where you could
friend people and they would get an RSS feed of your submission and you could
blindly digg their stuff. People where literally blindly digging there stuff
left and right.

The fact that this was going on alone should piss people off at Digg HQ. But
they let this go on for as long as they did is, to me, mind-boggling. Either
they were incompetent or they really consciously wanted the site to die.

But that's not even the worst part. But this was _very_ profitable for people
who can fine tune the process of getting to the digg frontpage. ("very
profitable" is subjective if you are making millions of $ a month. But if you
are making thousands of $ in your spare time with very little effort I think
it was profitable).

Digg users who were power users at that time (and still are) but was doing it
only for fun, now saw that they can actually have fun and make money at the
same time!

As it happens in most internet community (even here at HN) there are some
community celebrities and people will support them no matter what. They could
possibly do no harm. "babyman and co" (a la digg power-users) had such
mindless followers who would support them and mindlessly digg anything they
submit. And these power-users had relationships with publishers who would pay
them good money to submit their stuff. You get FP you make money, if you don't
get FP you still make (somewhat less) money for the "effort". But with power-
users with their mindless followers, they had a very very high probability of
hitting FP. So they were most sought after.

How do I know all these? Apart from being one of the top 20 digg users (until
recently, in terms of FP count) I knew 12 of the 20 top digg users personally
and met them often and some of the rest I spoke to regularly by phone and IM.

So how I personally profited from this?

As someone who is fairly tech savvy and half-decent writing ability. I setup 3
separate tech blogs/sites and with the co-ordination with other power users
(they didn't ask for a cut-off or money if you ask them to submit your own
sites) I was hitting the FP left and right. At one point I was getting 75-80%
on the FP stories and during christmas holiday with high CPMs premium ads I
was raking in ~8-10k a week from those 3 sites by spending less than 4 hours a
day (I am also counting my time on working on the sites). I don't know about
you guys, but to me, thats big money. After that, I was doing it full-time for
about one year.

(Since then I sold my site, and left digg. If you must know why, and I don't
have a non-cheesy answer, I felt like I was cheating, which I was, and doing
something very wrong. It hit my conscious, as hard as it might be to believe.
I wanted to wash myself out of this, so I sold the site and just left
everything that has to do with digg.)

But systematic manipulation was not limited to power users, there were
automatic bots, browsers plugins, and userscripts that could be systematically
used to digg and bury submissions. How I found out about this is I was once
hanging out with one of the powerusers and while waiting for our food I was
checking out digg (I know I am lame), and I saw his account was digging stuff
even though he was obviously not using digg himself at this very moment. So I
pressed him about it and he let me in his small secret group and now almost
everyone who matters does it. Sometimes around last year they did update their
site and did some mass banning on users who were using bots and scripts (I was
banned too but they gave me 2nd chance), but that didn't stop shit. Everyone
was back to the old game after few weeks.

At this point I must point out how ironic is that people, "babyman and co" (a
la power-users), who are leading the "digg revolt" this time around was the
subject of all the previous "digg revolts" (except for the first one). All
these time everyone was crying about getting rid of power-users, or influence
of a group of people. But now that they have "fixed" it, in the sense that
power-users don't have as much influence on it as they used to, people are
crying about the same features that gave the power-users the ability to
manipulate the site. Digg4 pretty much kills the concept of power users, yes
you can still game it, as we have seen with reddit feed being on Digg
frontpage, but that was according to digg a glitch in their algo, but its
nothing like before.

The concept of "individual power-users" is killed or diminished. Now the
publishers are the power-users, the more followers they have they more likely
their site will hit the FP and they get submitted automatically, but with
proper algo they can also let the regular user level out the field with user
generated contents (at least that what I understand from the chatter).

Digg4, in my opinion, is the only thing that will save digg. There was NEVER
people-powered-digg since v2, there was the _perception of it_ ; now it is
just obvious out in open.

Sorry for the wall of text and possible spell/gramm error. I felt like I
needed to say something about this. I don't use digg much anymore I usually
hang out here or at reddit.

~~~
adrianwaj
You seem perturbed. Would you ever consider setting up your own Digg
competitor, given Digg is going down?

~~~
formerpoweruser
I wouldn't say I am perturbed. I would say I am amused by all the "guess-
timations" related to digg whenever the subject of "Digg is dead" comes up. I
feel that there are very few people outside the digg power-users who
understands how systematic the gaming was going on. I am sure people knows
that gaming was going, but I don't think a lot of people understands or knows
the fine details.

Hopefully, by sharing my thought I could influence the widely held idea that
_"Digg finally screwed up bad this time"_ to _"Digg finally did something
right for the first time"_.

Honestly I feel that digg management is incompetent at best. Jay was more
interested in selling Digg to the highest bidder as soon as he joined digg and
after that didn't work out too well, he was more interested on generating
revenue (nothing wrong with that) at the expense of taking care of the site
and the community.

To answer your question. No I don't think I would do something like Digg. Digg
in its current form, and even when it started, is a glorified RSS feed; which
doesn't even reflect the choice of the hive-mind or your interest. The real
meat is in the community (just look at reddit). If you get the software right,
the user will take you from there. Besides who else wants another source of
distraction to get news?

------
MC27
One of the aspects not mentioned is that Digg was a tech website at the
beginning. The quality of the audience, and subsequently, the quality of the
content, decreased as they opened the flood gates to other categories.

It seems like their only option was to either stagnate with an increasingly
unappealing demographic, or reinvent themselves.

~~~
zbanks
It's the very nature of the beast (social news, that is)

You can't have a site to aggregate the "best" news without restricting your
user base. With fewer users, you can't make as much money.

~~~
rkalla
zbanks,

Interesting point, and that might explain why sites like HN and reddit
(primarily technical and occasionally quirky) are still maintaining relatively
high quality content.

I suppose it's the jack of all, master of none curse.

I would agree with the assessment of the previous poster that the quality of
Digg did seem to be effected to the site opening it's categories up to the
world, and not just to the tech community... that did seem like a milestone in
me noticing I wasn't quite as happy with what I was reading.

Also see reddit in the situation where with 6 people, it is barely scraping
by... sort of a crappy rock-and-a-hard-place aspect of social news.

Then there is the Facebook or Twitter approach which is the polar opposite end
of something like HN, you have ALL content from everyone's brain, and the real
money is in figuring out algorithms to surface it accordingly.

I don't know that I'm holding my breath for that algorithm though.

------
trezor
I remember reading some interview with the digg-staff around the Cassandra
switch. I remember that the "problems" they were facing with the relational
databases were mostly _bad queries_ designed to exhaust even a decent DB.

Instead of just writing proper SQL, they wanted to replace their entire server
architecture. To me that looked like a pretty bad decision and I would halfway
label that a "technical problem", although it may be more related to the
technical competence of the staff than anything else.

Now ofcourse I can't remember where I saw it, or what the specific issues were
and I'd love to revisit it. Anyone got a good memory or a link handy? :)

------
ergo98
That's a pretty absolute statement based upon, it seems, absolutely nothing.

~~~
blurry
And it's pretty ironic to have a writer criticize a rushed release by saying,
Digg v4 was also suffering from a surprisingly amount of down time. Kettle,
meet pot.

~~~
rkalla
blurry,

I'm not clear on what what ironic -- that the release was rushed, so down time
should be excused or something else. Could you clarify?

~~~
sprout
>I'm not clear on what what ironic

Brilliant.

(The irony is that you're missing a word in the sentence blurry quoted. And
you did it again.)

