
Kevin Rose reflects on Digg, the dangers of outside investors, and his legacy - iProject
http://gigaom.com/2012/07/25/kevin-rose-reflects-on-digg-the-dangers-of-outside-investors-and-his-legacy/
======
kn0thing
My thoughts on why reddit won: [http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-
reddit-the-smalle...](http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-
smallest-biggest)

At the time, my open letter got me lambasted by the TechCrunch posse (badge of
honor?), but I do hope all founders can learn from the digg story:
<http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose>

Since Steve and I first learned of digg (a couple weeks after we launched) all
the way to right now (as a board member) -- I'm always reminding myself of how
little there's to be gained from thinking about competition. Founders,
regarding competitors, be aware but don't care!

Also: one probably shouldn't publicly blow your nose on a competitor's shirt.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyqe7A5ombA&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyqe7A5ombA&feature=player_detailpage#t=41s)

~~~
jedberg
> Since Steve and I first learned of digg (a couple weeks after we launched)
> all the way to right now (as a board member) -- I'm always reminding myself
> of how little there's to be gained from thinking about competition.
> Founders, regarding competitors, be aware but don't care!

I don't think people realize how rarely we talked about or looked at Digg in
the reddit office. Every time I see founders who have a screen in their office
dedicated to their competitors website I cry a little inside. Luckily it
doesn't seem to happen often.

------
citricsquid
As much as everyone loves to blame Digg v4 for Digg's failure I don't think
that's entirely accurate. I definitely think that v4 sped up the demise, but
Digg as a product was _not_ what the majority of people wanted.

If you compare Digg and reddit the differences are pretty big, beyond the
basic premise ("links that people vote on") Digg had a very big focus on
_news_ and "social" whereas reddit focuses on _content_ , whether that's
farmed from elsewhere or created by reddit users. If you compare the top 100
links from r/all vs. digg.com/all you can see a clear difference in content.

A Digg type site definitely has a place on the internet, as it's been shown
Digg _still_ has traffic now, I just think reddit was the _natural_ successor
to Digg, regardless of the mistakes Digg made.

I think reddit vs. Digg can be compared to Twitter. Twitter would never have
worked in 2001, the internet just wasn't ready for it, but in 2012 it's doing
incredibly well. The internet wasn't ready for what reddit is now in 2004.
Digg catered to what people in 2004 wanted, but it doesn't cater to what
people want in 2012. reddit succeeded because reddit is more of a _platform_
than it is a website, it offers the basic framework for a community link
sharing website but their focus was loose enough (with stuff like subreddits)
that it was able to evolve with the internet. If that makes any sense...

~~~
debacle
I think the difference is that reddit can be exactly what you want it to be,
to an extent. Or, rather, of the 100s of communities on reddit, you only have
to belong to a select few of them if you so desire, and the kinds of
communities you can find on reddit are vast, varied, and uniquely interesting.

~~~
steven_h
This is exactly what makes reddit so great. I don't have to look at pictures
of cats and rage comics if I only want to se stuff about
programming/technology/etc.

------
ojbyrne
I find the whole we (investors, "founders")/they (non-generalists who can't
move up and down the stack) kind of jarring, especially since I somehow
managed to fall into the gap between founders and employees. Programmers are
generally opinionated, especially about the domain they work in. My impression
of Kevin's problems with programmers when I was there (inception to October
2007) is that they gave him too much shit, criticized his ideas, and generally
created hassles for him (all good things, IMO), and he didn't really handle
that well (IMO). Forget "moving up and down the stack," they wanted to
_architect_ the stack.

If you're non-technical and come back from some conference and say we're now
rearchitecting in Rails/Node/Brainfuck/whatever cool new tech you just heard
about, you're probably going to get some pushback. And that pushback, from the
other side's perspective, could be presented as "you're just a non-generalist
who can't move up and down the stack."

Its important to remember that Kevin isn't really technical.

~~~
duaneb
I know little to nothing about Digg and even less about Kevin Rose, internal
drama, et al... however, hiring people who are locked into certain
technologies, especially non-optimal ones like PHP, seems to be a bad idea.

~~~
ojbyrne
My point was that nobody was locked into any language. But if you have a large
complex website with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, the company is
somewhat locked in to the language. When some non-technical executive mandates
that we're all switching to language X and everything is going to be rebuilt
from scratch, you will get some pushback.

------
swalsh
“We ran into these huge problems, and didn’t have generalists who could go up
and down the stack,”

I'm sure this is a cherry picked quote, but it surprises me that he thought
the technologists he hired had to do with any of their problems other then
performance. Sites like Reddit/Digg/HN live and die by the community they
frame. The communities seem to accept an unusually high down time. As Reddit
started becoming more mainstream it benefited from segmentation. HN, has
benefited from a foundation of considerate users, which are given more
privileges then newer users. Digg allowed bad users to dilute good users until
good users broke down and decided to seek refuge outside of the site.

~~~
caseysoftware
This just feels like blame shifting to anyone but himself.

If they needed generalists, why didn't _he_ hire generalists? My understanding
is V4 was a mishmash of numerous technologies and all along, it sounded like
there wasn't a vision for how the pieces would work together.. just a vague
goal.

------
mcfunley
> Rose also said that Digg hired individuals with very niche skills, like
> developers who only knew PHP and were not as useful once PHP went out of
> use.

"v4 would have worked out if only my employees were smarter" is a pretty
classless and delusional assessment of what went wrong.

~~~
shard972
Really? He touches on 1 of the problems he encountered with digg and you
interpret this as Kevin throwing his employees under the bus?

~~~
yardie
He's been throwing his employees under the bus for over a year now. The site
was written in PHP by PHP developers. Somehow that wasn't good enough so he
pivoted and replaced them with C++ developers.

Anyway, I liked Digg. Then then newer users got involved and stories they
didn't like got buried. The first time I used it the articles were technical
and really interesting. Then it got political, stupid memes, etc. In its
default state I think it was better than Reddit. Reddit is great but you have
to work on it. Clean your browser cache and look at reddit like you're going
their for the first time. What do you see? Crap from r/AWW, r/atheism, and
r/politics take up all or most of the frontpage.

~~~
mattdeboard
Then unsubscribe from those subreddits and subscribe to those that appeal to
your interests. Manicure your own content a little bit.

~~~
pkteison
As a new user, how do you know that it's good enough to be worth logging in
and investing the effort? The default front page is your initial impression,
and it does not appear like it is likely to attract interesting people to talk
to in its current state.

~~~
drumdance
Depends on how they got there. If they just typed in reddit.com in the
location bar, you may be right. But I bet a lot of people find the site via a
deep link.

------
debacle
> ...news they’d seen on Twitter, rather than news they might have previously
> seen on Digg.

Reddit, for the most part, does not have this problem - reddit is about the
community and the discussion, not about the MLP. Maybe Rose still doesn't
understand (or maybe doesn't want to admit) why Digg failed.

> Rose also said that Digg hired individuals with very niche skills, like
> developers who only knew PHP and were not as useful once PHP went out of
> use.

If you own a startup, and you're hiring the kind of programmer that only knows
one language, you're already making some pretty big mistakes.

~~~
obtu
(MLP: Mindless Link Passing, a term that I think originates from kuro5hin)

~~~
debacle
Propagation, but yes I should have defined my abbreviation.

------
emehrkay
I like Rose. In a lot of ways he represents the best of my generation of
entrepreneurs more than Zuckerberg and anyone else in that era. The fact that
he keeps working, and seems to always have something new, is inspiring and in
a way, motivates me to do the same.

Pownce was ahead of its time. Had it been released in 2011, it would be a
viable twitter alternative. I guess that's what he was getting at with how he
wants his legacy to be seen.

~~~
balac
How can he possibly be the best when everyone one of his projects have failed?
I also admire him, but lately he seems better at angel investing and spotting
other peoples successes than building his own.

~~~
emehrkay
Is being an entrepreneur more about winning or persevering?

~~~
afterburner
Surely most people want to be a _successful_ entrepreneur...

~~~
emehrkay
And Kevin Rose hasn't been successful? How long does a company you started
need to live on after you've left for it to be considered successful (Digg)?
Was Digg not the go-to, poster-site, of web2.0 a time? Is that not a success?

~~~
duaneb
Generally, a company's purpose is to make money. Digg lost $40 million. How is
that a success?

------
estacado
The way I see it, what went wrong with Digg was the amount of influence
"superstar" users had on the stories that make the front page. The fact that
they kept and displayed the "ranking" of users just shows how this culture of
superstardom is ingrained within Digg mechanics itself. It may not have
effected the traffic or growth at the time, but it did affect the quality of
stories highlighted. Digg knew its system was being gamed and I think that is
what pushed them to make the changes they did on v4 (apart from the money),
where publishers were given priority over individually submitted stories.

------
gavinlynch
To be honest, I think at some point the user-base and comment section just
became too much for me. There was a certain strain of conversation that
everything inevitably devolved into, and I left and I know a lot of other
people left when that became too much.

~~~
duaneb
This applies to every social community once it gets popular, though. The front
page of Reddit used to be tolerable, for instance.

~~~
gavinlynch
Although I've never really been a reddit user, I can see your point. It's an
interesting question: how do you actively maintain a culture of respect,
thoughtfulness and two-way dialog?

This is one of the few spots I've ever seen it on. As a newcomer to HN, I find
it very unique. Great resource.

------
snorkel
_" ... when we sort of put out a word that this was up for sale [...] there
were spam sites wanted to make it a link farm, and a bunch of properties that
would have really screwed things up"_

Yeah, that would've been terrible compared to what actually happened.

