
Will the DiggBar instigator be fired? - raganwald
http://counternotions.com/2009/04/14/diggbar/
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raganwald
_What happens to startup people who make serious mistakes and misjudge
potentially debilitating risks to their companies and brands? What, for
example, happened to the clever people who concocted Beacon for Facebook, the
privacy debacle disguised as an advertising platform that comes once in a
century? What happened to the folks who decided to build an architecture for
Twitter that couldn’t possibly handle a real-time messaging system at global
scale that nearly sank the company? Who at Yahoo thought it was a good idea to
pay $5.7 billion to Broadcast.com in 1999?... The object isn’t individual
punishment, of course. It’s a matter of ethics and transparency._

I call _bullshit_ on the statement that the object isn't individual
punishment. If someone had a truly, tremendously bad idea, does that mean they
are more likely to have bad ideas in the future? Maybe they just have more
ideas, period, just as the programmers named in the most defect reports are
often the programmers who write the most code.

Naming and shaming people can be important for cases of malfeasance. Although
I detest the diggbar and other sneaky ways of eroding privacy, I am not sure
that they are matters of moral turpitude.

And if you believe some things are deeply wrong, the author of this post seems
to conflate creation of the Facebook beacon (a privacy issue) with creation of
the diggbar (gaming a search engine) and with Twitter's architecture
(optimizing a startup or speed to market) and with overpaying for an
acquisition (behaving like everyone else during the last Tulip Mania).

~~~
mustpax
The questionable ethics of scapegoating aside, comparing Twitter's scalability
issues with a misguided feature is particularly pointless.

If you wanted to blame someone for a feature (if you're into that sort of
thing), you could either go after the concept or the execution. Once you pick
either of the two, I'm sure you could winnow those down to a few people and
then flip a coin or something.

If you want to blame someone for an app that's not scaling, you're trying to
tie down a completely amorphous concept to a single event. Do you fire someone
because they didn't have the clairvoyance of realizing that some lock
somewhere had too much contention?

Scaling is really hard; and like other dark arts, it involves a lot of
sleepless nights, long stretches of despair punctuated by moments of pure joy.
There's just no easy way out of it.
<http://twitter.com/Werner/status/1472242433>

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webwright
Stupid, stupid idea.

First of all, ideas like this don't happen in startups without some sort of
consensus or approval. If you're the founder/CEO and something like this
happens, it better be YOU taking responsibility... Not passing it off on the
person who had the idea.

Second of all, wild ideas are part of doing a startup. Some hit, and some
miss. Slap the wrist of someone who comes up with bad idea and you make your
entire team more conservative

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mannicken
There are so few people coming up boldly with new ideas and so many cowards in
the world. I consider punishment for wrong ideas to be extreme form of
idiocracy.

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websevenpointoh
Although not a regular user of digg (for many of the reasons this site
exists), I don't see what's so vastly intrusive about it. For a site that
aggregates links, it's not totally nonsensical to frame the pages it links to.
Also, clicking the 'x' in the upper right corner kills it immediately. I like
the thought of being able to digg up an article as I read it rather than
reading it, navigating back to digg and digging it.

~~~
Zev
Not everyone _cares_ about Digg and wants to digg in the first place. If I
don't want to digg or have anything to do with the site whenever possible, why
should I have to see the bar?

Yes, it makes sense from Digg's perspective as a business. But from my
perspective as a user, it sucks and I have a severe dislike for it.

~~~
dantheman
You don't see the bar unless you go to digg, or click a link that some took
from digg, without removing ti from the frame (not hard at all). And the
person who linked it using the digg, link most likely thinks that adds value
(ability to access the comments on that link).

Reddit's had this feature forever, I don't understand why people have a
problem with diggs version.

~~~
Zev
Its not a matter of being hard to remove. It can be the easiest thing in the
world to do. But I would still have to keep doing whatever action is necessary
to remove the bar. Over and over and over for every link. Plus the X is on the
wrong side of the screen for me — Mac's have the Close/Maximize(ish)/Minimie
buttons on the left hand side of the window, not right hand side like on
Windows.

Reddit's bar is _not on by default_. Digg's is. This is a big difference.
Having the frame and not simply redirecting means I can't see _exactly_ what
the pages URL is, it makes bookmarking, sorting and tagging that much harder.
And site-specific scripts break.

The point is, it doesn't do anything to help _enhance_ my browsing session.
Being able to read comments on Digg is _not_ a plus as far as I'm concerned.
Being able to give a company that makes a website I don't use (or particularly
like) my browsing habits is _not_ something I have a huge desire to do.
Besides, it doesn't put comments directly on the page. I still have to click
through to Digg to read them.

Oh, and <http://skitch.com/zadr/bms2t/not-useful> <\-- Seems to keep
happening. Very difficult to read content if I want to do any scrolling at
all.

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brasidas
The way to judge "firable" mistakes is whether the person was making a mistake
based on the information that had available when they made the decision. The
Diggbar was a bad decision made from bad principles and bad thinking.

Having an idea that fails is something else entirely.

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andr
With all the DiggBar talk I'm surprised no one mentioned Facebook, which does
exactly the same when you post a link on your news feed.

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jgrahamc
^Will^Should would make this an interesting discussion. Otherwise this is
pointless.

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rarestnews
I stopped reading at "_startups_ like Digg"

