
Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg - mikerice
http://blog.betaworks.com/post/27070595530/digg
======
alaskamiller
Reddit won the game, slow and steady. Reddit now literally powers the
_generation_ of news cycles across the blogerverse. BuzzFeed? HuffPo? Gawker?
TheDaily? Reddit, yesterday.

First thing first is rescue the culture. Digg engineering already fled, the
peanut gallery in the valley keeps squawking with delight about your failure,
and all you have left is some nicely designed pages showing double digit gains
on stale links that's a shade away from being as if they were spun up by a
Russian spam squad. Save yourself, redo the logo, redo the color scheme, don't
let legacy drag you down.

Second thing is do some soul searching, figuring out what layer Digg wants to
play in. Links aggregation? Community building and content creation? Traffic?
Attention? Engagement? That elusive ad sharing model for content creators?

After that figure out for who. Reddit's core is dying, and eventually it'll be
fully crowded out by the mainstreaming of rage comics, aww pics, and counter-
Tumblr-pseudo-nerdy programming. Do you target those people, the walking
wounded much like Slashdot?

Or do you go after the youths, the ones addicted to Instagrams, 9gag, imgur,
but bored of their Facebook feeds? Then play the waiting game. New is
everything old, after all.

The game's so different now from 2005. All the majors have feeds now. All the
majors have figured out sharing, commenting, and extracting action on a story
item. On top of that you're competing against mobile guys like Flipboard.

This is one of those situations where execution is easier than creating an
idea. What is Digg's $1MM idea? Good luck with that because Digg needs to be
futuristic but also _really_ lucky twice being at the right place, the right
time, with the right idea. Once you're lucky, twice you're good, right?

I bet this kind of flame out, this one thing keeps Mark Zuckerberg from
sleeping.

~~~
blhack
No it doesn't.

Go to the front page of reddit right now and try to find me a piece of news.

I see 2 items out of 25 links.

One of them is a [linkbait title] story about wikileaks winning a case against
VISA (in iceland).

The other is about a Canadian supreme court ruling.

~~~
citricsquid
The replies you'll get are "you make your own reddit, just remove the popular
subreddits!" but you're right. reddit is usable for _hardcore_ users that want
to invest real time into their experience, it's atrocious for casual users
(that don't care for the meme spam). There is a large hole that (new) Digg
could fill.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I agree, but I think that Reddit is only usable for a specific subset of
hardcore users.

Unfortunately, Reddit's admins chose to take a hands-off approach to policing
bad behavior in the community. As a result, Reddit regulars have to guard
themselves against providing enough information in their comments to attract
the attention of a diligent troll.

I had a 5-year-old account on Reddit, and had been active on there from just
about the beginning. I had hand-picked subreddits and the like. But,
ultimately, it was better just to delete my account entirely and become a
casual reader.

Now Reddit is basically the daily equivalent of reading the comics section in
the newspaper.

I think Digg has a huge opportunity here. I doubt that they will take
advantage of it though.

~~~
stcredzero
_I had a 5-year-old account on Reddit, and had been active on there from just
about the beginning. I had hand-picked subreddits and the like. But,
ultimately, it was better just to delete my account entirely and become a
casual reader._

Wow, could you fill us in on exactly what happened?

------
jgroome
> The News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find,
> read and share the stories the internet is talking about. Right now.

With my cynicism hat on nice and tight, it seems a bit late for that. Digg
WAS, in its heyday, the best place to find and share online content. But as
the management undertook on iffy decision after another, and as imitators
sprung up left right and centre, it lost its place in the online world. Sad.

We have plenty of content aggregators now. The kind of people Digg 5.0 (?!)
will target are probably more than happy finding their entertainment through
Twitter, Facebook, and dare I say it, Reddit.

Having said that, I for one wish the new team all the luck in the world in
trying to get the site back to its former glory, and I look forward to trying
it out.

~~~
hello_asdf
I liked Reddit back when it was less well known. Now, it just appears that the
content appeals to the lowest common denominator. Some of the content is still
great (i.e. r/dwarffortress), but a lot of the site has degraded into junk. If
anyone has some good subreddits that are still decent, I'd love to know what
they are.

~~~
corford
I don't use reddit so have a fairly basic understanding of how it works but
looking at all these replies about subreddits, it struck me that basically
reddit is a web2.0 version of usenet. So I guess that means good content is
there, you just need to know where to look :)

P.S. for the redditors: I have nothing against reddit, it's just that I'm
already drowning in information and never found the time to get in to it.

~~~
awj
That's actually a pretty decent analogy. Obviously the focus on posting links
and ranking and such is different, but the user experience of someone totally
new is similar. As is the searching for tiny pockets of awesome in a sea of
idiocy.

~~~
corford
Heh heh I love your phrase "searching for tiny pockets of awesome in a sea of
idiocy" - that pretty much sums up my entire relationship with the internet :D

------
marknutter
This is a case of a company having delusions of grandeur. Instead of humming
along with 10 or so employees raking in cash hand-over fist, they tried to
grow as fast and as large as possible to try to revolutionize news. Instead,
Reddit did the former and is stable and profitable; it never pretends to be
something it's not.

Not all companies are going to change the world, nor should they. I see
Facebook and Twitter making the same mistakes. Perhaps Facebook is a great
place to keep in touch with friends but nothing more. Perhaps Twitter is
simply a great replacement for blogging, nothing more. Instead of filling
their niches and quietly making a small number of employees very wealthy, they
try to become these massive institutions that are reliant on very fickle user
bases. It's a house of cards.

~~~
codexon
As someone who used Digg and Reddit from their infancy I have been able to
observe when and how Digg fell from #1. I don't think they failed because they
were having delusions of grandeur.

The 1st mistake that Digg made was the introduction of power users. As a power
user your stories were artificially boosted to the front page. After this
happened, I noticed a huge decline in quality where the front page became
mostly populated by articles from cracked and huffingtonpost. This quote from
another user summed up the situation.

In version 3 around 100 diggers ran 80% of the front page – to get on the
front page you had to cover Kevin getting a blow job from Stallman, or get a
power user to submit your story. At that point Digg was not a democracy at
all, but a curated list by paid Digg pros who shilled for hire. If you were a
nice guy, or a tech publisher, you had power digger friends who would submit
your stuff for you for free.

Then there is the 2nd mistake that everyone knows about. Digg 4.0, the last
mistake that finally made Reddit bigger than Digg. Large domains Engadget and
Mashable flooded the front page with their auto-submitted stories. It was then
that Kevin Rose betrayed the power users for large publishers, just as he had
betrayed the regular users for power users many years ago.

If Digg had not done any of this, there would have been a very good chance
that they would still have been the largest aggregator today.

~~~
marknutter
Please; power users were controlling the content on the site _long_ before
they turned 3.0 on. It was a well known fact that a small minority of users
controlled the vast majority of the front page content (mrbabyman, for
instance).

~~~
codexon
I know this. I was just quoting someone else.

I remember when power users came out far before v3. That was when I started
browsing Reddit more often.

------
uptown
From WSJ: "The price was just $500,000, three people familiar with the matter
said—a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors
including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen."

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230437380457752...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304373804577523181002565776.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet)

~~~
runn1ng
"None of Digg's remaining employees will join Betaworks as part of the
acquisition."

what did they acually buy? The know how? The technology? None of that is
revolutionary today. And there is no community on digg right now whatsoever
(unlike /. which still lives its own life).

Maybe the name is worth something, but I don't really think that it matters
that much.

~~~
unreal37
The domain name and brand recognition. For $500K, cheap.

~~~
vaksel
yeah, something shady must be going on.

My guess is that you'll find similar people on Digg's and News.me boards. And
this was just a way to a) write off Digg as a permanent loss off the books and
b) transfer those assets cheaply to the other company, which might boost them
from being a loser to being a winner

Noone sells Digg for $500K...not unless they are millions and millions in debt

------
chimi
Sorry for my ignorance. I've been searching for exactly what went wrong with
the Digg redesign, but I can't find anything that really spells it out.
Something with side-by-side comparisons or a deeper analysis than "Users leave
in drove after Digg redesign that alienates user base." How did it alienate
those users? Of course I was aware that it happened, but because I wasn't part
of the community, I never understood what it was, exactly.

Also, is this an example that illustrates why craigslist refuses to redesign
their site? A redesign really could spell the end of craiglist like digg.

~~~
gamble
The Digg redesign had any number of problems, most of them inherent in any
project to completely reimplement a complex piece of software that already has
a large user base. Bugs, missing features, etc.

IMO, the larger problem was one of philosophy. Was the site primarily designed
for people generating the traffic or those receiving it? How do you deal with
people gaming the system? Digg chose to side with the people gaming the
system, presumably because it was a more obvious path to profitability. (Digg
had a large staff and ridiculously high burn rate) Prior to the v4 redesign,
however, there was at least the illusion that regular users' submissions and
voting mattered. Digg v4 simply eliminated the roundabout of gaming the system
by making votes almost irrelevant; publishers and marketeers could simply pipe
all of their content directly to the top of the frontpage by gathering a
sufficiently large number of followers. It made the site little more than a
pseudo-RSS frontend for content farms.

Reddit has been successful by fighting a vigorous, if behind-the-scenes, war
against spamming and gaming. It may be regressing toward the mean, but at
least it's a mean defined by the users rather than a spammer.

------
bitwize
Why? Reddit is like Digg 2 now. Back in the day Digg was for dudebros who
wanted to swap girls gone wild links while Reddit was the "isn't Haskell
grand?" place. But since about 2008 or so when Reddit rubbed up against Digg
and 4chan and a big chunk of their user base rubbed off and clung to it, Digg
has been made wholly redundant.

------
spinchange
I used to love digg in the early days. People point to the v4 revision as
being the final nail, but they started wavering and losing the magic literal
years before that.

FWIW, Pligg (the digg clone CMS) looks like it's getting a twitter bootstrap
upgrade. I've been wanting to roll my own "digg/reddit/HN" for ages. Maybe
now's the time. <http://www.pligg.com/demo/>

~~~
dreadsword
FYI: Reddit is open source. You don't have to roll your own, just go git it:
<https://github.com/reddit/>

~~~
Angostura
FWIW, I found Pligg a lot easier to configure and set up when I needed to
create a quick intranet news portal last year.

~~~
dreadsword
Fair enough - I've played with Pligg too, and found it really easy. I've never
tried to deploy reddit, though. I imagine it to be much more robust &
therefore complicated...

------
fein
I am incredibly skeptical about the plausibility of resurrecting Digg, but for
500k I sure hope they do. It was my first social media home and it would be
nice to be able to go back to what it was; not a marketing front end for
corporate prostitution.

Fingers crossed, but betaworks seems to want to take Digg in the direction it
should have gone during the v2->v3 upgrade.

~~~
samstave
Not a hope.

And the fact that they are going to fold it into news.me to send links of
articles that others are reading sounds retarded.

~~~
fein
Oh damn, if they integrate that into news.me, they've shot themselves with a
$500,000 proverbial bullet in the proverbial foot.

At this point Reddit can probably not be killed. The only hope that betaworks
could have at success is a vanilla relaunch of Digg, minus the gaming problems
and "advertising for hire" functionality. Remember Digg when Dragon Age:
Origins came out?

------
Tobu
Digg is a shadow of an online community, but its fall gave us War, a three-
part social media epic by ncomment:
[https://secure.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/3424896427/siz...](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/3424896427/sizes/o/in/set-72157615924666317/)

------
untog
I don't doubt that something can be done with it, but I'm dubious of Digg as a
brand these days. Similar to MySpace, it's lost all the credibility it once
had.

------
cantbecool
The first iteration of digg looks awfully like reddit.

<http://web.archive.org/web/20041230012732/http://digg.com/>

------
dr_
From techcrunch: "Betaworks, says Digg, will soon unveil a new “cloud-based
version of Digg” that will complement News.me’s iPhone and iPad apps" Not sure
what this means, Digg was never a desktop client. It's betaworks using lingo
that will grab the attention of non tech readers to suggest something
interesting is going on. But it isn't. Just like with a lot of their other
stuff. Bitly is a simple concept which has been done many times. News.me is
nothing interesting at all, just an attempt to rip off Flipboard. Chartbeat is
just another way to visualize data that's available by so many other means.
Nothing original with betaworks.

------
zinssmeister
the german Digg clone Yigg.de also sold today. Funny how that timing works
out. (<http://yigg.de/nachrichten/2012/07/12/ekaabo-uebernimmt-yigg>)

------
paulbjensen
This should be a film, the story has everything: business press coverage, the
BluRay code event, death threats to the founder, a near-deal with Google, the
exit of the CEO, the 4.0 debacle, the company downsizes, the founder leaves,
the company struggles, then the company sells it's shell.

I hope BusinessWeek does a piece on this.

------
dreadsword
$500k: hard to tell if they've over- or under- paid. What's the Digg Balance
Sheet look like? How about the last year of cash flow statements? Without
those, its impossible to evaluate the worthiness of the deal.

~~~
brc
Note it's 'acquiring the assets' rather than 'acquiring the company'.

In general this means the steaming wreck of a company will be left behind,
asset stripped. In other words, if Digg owes you money, you're not going to be
able to ask the new owners for it.

It also means it's up to them which employees (if any) they take on.

This is a sale of brand name, domain name, IP and probably very little else.

------
PaulHoule
the trouble is that fixing Digg means getting rid of the existing user base

~~~
underdown
Ya, Kevin & Jay tried that back in 2006 - worked out real well for them.

~~~
PaulHoule
they gotta get them to sign a statement that they'll click on ads

------
saurik
I wonder what they consider the "core assets" to be; some specific items I'm
curious about: domain name, codebase, hosting contracts, Aeron chairs,
employees.

~~~
larrys
For example:

[http://www.domainnamenews.com/domain-sales/diggcom-
acquires-...](http://www.domainnamenews.com/domain-sales/diggcom-acquires-
wefollowcom-domain-side-story/6351)

------
synack
I imagine it'll end up costing them quite a bit more than $500k when the dust
settles... Digg probably has quite a bit of debt racked up by now.

------
ruhsler
news.me + digg could be good

------
adventureful
The only reason it's $500k and not $0 is to save a small amount of face. Digg
is losing money, and has never made money in its entire history, so it's going
to cost Betaworks a lot more than $500k to take it over.

~~~
SwellJoe
Digg bleeds money because they're overstaffed for what they do. Reddit ate
their lunch with _five_ paid people, while Digg was employing dozens. I think
they had over 100 people on staff at their peak. Even now, when reddit has an
order of magnitude more traffic than Digg ever had (1 billion+ pageviews a
month), reddit runs with a staff of about 10 people. Digg probably still has a
whole lot of dead weight, even at this point when the whole thing is only
worth two and a half good developers salaries.

~~~
earl
Yeah, but reddit appears to have been staffed with employees who worked all
hours of the night and day for a salary; see blog posts from before reddit
gold. That's not sustainable and unless you have a line on a set of really
smart suckers who want to work way too much for the same money then can get
elsewhere working half the hours or on call... you need more employees.

~~~
SwellJoe
Two points:

1\. I don't think that people, working all hours, are actually significantly
more productive than those working regular hours. In fact, in knowledge work,
there's good evidence that you only get two or three hours of real
productivity per day, no matter how long you keep banging your head on the
keyboard. 2\. Even if reddit developers and staff were _twice_ as productive
as Digg folks, that only indicates that Digg had _five_ times too many people
(instead of ten times too many).

------
CubicleNinjas
How the mighty have fallen...

------
anewguy
How much do you think it would cost to buy reddit?

~~~
arn
Problem with buying Reddit is that you would still never really own reddit.

If digg's fall has taught us anything, it's that heavily community-driven
sites are owned by the community. Try to make any major/unpopular changes in
direction or business, and the entire site may come crumbling down.

