

Why Digg Lost #1 Spot to Reddit - nashpjev
http://zurb.us/eVMBdu

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michaelchisari
Digg lost to Reddit because they thought you could have a community-driven
site which sidesteps the community to cater to advertisers.

So the community left. And felt so betrayed, they salted the earth behind
them.

~~~
axod
Until Reddit posts a decent profit it's not clear either of them really 'won'
is it?

Digg tried to monetize and drove away their users. I'm not sure Reddit has
really tried to monetize as much yet apart from their 'donate' thing.

~~~
planckscnst
I really don't think it's the monetization that drove people away. I left
because I found the content to be increasingly bland, repetitive, and
irrelevant.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Try subscribing to /r/BestOf or /r/IAMA. Some of the more non-bland/repetitive
stuff comes up there. Though whether it's relevant depends on your individual
measure.

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redthrowaway
People keep thinking that Digg lost to Reddit because of v4. This is flat out
wrong. Reddit had passed Digg in most metrics months before the redesign. It
had been steadily gaining users for years, whereas Digg had been steadily
losing them since at least January.

Personally, I think the subreddit system did its job. It was put in place so
the site could scale without losing its community feel, and I think it's done
that admirably. I've long since removed most of the major subreddits from my
frontpage, added a bunch that interest me, and now it feels like a fairly
small site that's perfectly tailored to my interests and sensibilities.

~~~
chime
Absolutely. Originally, everyone wanted subreddits to be like tags, myself
included. But overtime I've realized how awesome subreddits are (even though
it is a pain to have multiple subreddits covering the same topic). But now
that I've subscribed to some wonderful subreddits, I love my personal reddit
experience (/r/doctorwho, /r/askscience, /r/linguistics, /r/skeptic).

Everyone talks about having a personalized experience on the internet, from
Netflix & Amazon's recommendations to customized dashboards but nobody has got
it right except for Reddit. When I go to reddit.com homepage, I only see what
I want and if I don't like a subreddit, I remove it from my list. I don't ever
feel like reddit is going down the hill or that the olden days were better. It
really is a community of communities.

~~~
brianpan
Making the same point a different way- A lot of sites don't really have a
compelling reason to login, except that you're forced to login before you can
comment. With reddit, I want to login- to see more than the default frontpage,
to see replies, etc.

------
colkassad
I used to enjoy listening to This Week in Tech until they started focusing on
Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga. I still listen because I genuinely like Leo
Laporte's presentation and personality. However, I am disappointed with him
and tech journalism in general in how they covered Digg's downfall. They
really didn't cover it at all. I really think they turned a blind eye, hoping
that things would bounce back because they apparently gained so much traffic
from Digg. I understand Digg still gets decent traffic so maybe they just
don't want to make things worse.

To me it seemed to be a big story. Kevin Rose was on TWiT a couple episodes
ago and they hardly mentioned Digg's problems. Journalism indeed.

~~~
krakensden
Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose worked together on The Screen Savers many moons
ago, they're probably friends at this point.

~~~
portman
That's an understatement: Leo effectively _discovered_ Kevin. I'd bet that
Kevin asks Leo to be godfather to his first-born child.

I remember listening to the TWIT episodes around the Digg V4 fracas, and I
thought Leo made it very clear that he would be unable to cover the story
without bias.

Also, TWIT is an _opinion_ show by its very nature. It's the tech equivalent
to an OpEd page in a newspaper.

------
easyfrag
Has anyone written a good post-mortem of the Digg v4 debacle yet? An old
fashioned expose built on interviews with the people involved, I reckon
there's a lot of lessons around building and maintaining a community in there.
These "Top X reasons this happened" posts can not do this subject justice.

~~~
Lewisham
I think you'd need to wait for the people involved to leave their jobs. I'm
not sure Adelson has shown too much willingness in talking either. There's not
a lot to gain from it.

~~~
sfrench
There really is an interesting post-mortem to be had, but I'm just not sure
you're going to be able to interview employees to get it. The most candid
talks happen between employees in IM conversations and over beers, and likely
won't be hashed out online.

I loved my time at Digg. I worked on some great things, learned a ton, and
yes, came out with some cautionary tales that will serve me well through my
career.

------
tomelders
Digg started out for me (a long time ago) as a place where I could "discover"
the "stuff" that interested me with a minimum amount of noise from the stuff
that didn't. Eventually though, it became broader in it's appeal and my own
private little corner of discovery became infested with memes, lolcats and
motivational lolsters. I was tiring of Digg by this point and the redesign
simply made it easy for me to jump ship. Then I found Hacker News and I
couldn't be fucking happier. Void filled.

Digg isn't losing to Reddit, the market for that kind of site is shattering
into millions of tiny little peices. Hacker News is one of those tiny little
pieces. Stack Overflow is another.

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jacques_chester
That was a bit hand-wavy. The basic thesis seems to be that Digg asked the
wrong questions. Slow down champ, don't get too specific.

~~~
brianpan
And comments Rose made defending the design after the fact are going to try
and spin a positive light. That's not "misinterpreting the results". Internal
discussions may have been very different.

------
Kilimanjaro
Digg lost when it became Reddit's front page. Pure garbage.

Reddit won when they diversified their front page into groups. I rarely visit
the front page now, only programming, coding, webdev, python and javascript
groups.

Noise levels were reduced almost to zero.

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kingsidharth
They lost because they failed to understand what problem they were solving and
redesigned the whole system (and site)which targeted to solve some problem
that they couldn't.

Why users went their was some games, some content and personal communities and
power-play (that's my view of it, it could be different) and then they tried
to make it user centered like twitter - which solves entirely different
problem.

Now if I can't do what I used your site for, why would I use it anymore?

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radioactive21
digg was losing to reddit well before all of that. It is actually why I think
they took such a huge (and in hindsight stupid) risk with the design. The way
they implemented the new design and how they reacted to users frustration that
was the last straw.

I honestly think whoever was in charge got pressured and acted with money and
greed in mind instead of the actual users. Karma is a bitch.

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DupDetector
Duplicate:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2009244>

1 comment there.

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insight
hmmm... Compete.com says that while Digg lost 17%, reddit gains only 2.6%

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BonoboBoner
'cause they took a big fat shiaat on their users. nuff said.

