
Kevin Rose: “One Of Us Has To Leave” - jasonlbaptiste
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/05/kevin-rose-one-of-us-has-to-leave/
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staunch
My guess is that the root cause is really Digg's (relative) stagnation. They
all expected to sell out years ago and the drudgery and risk is probably
getting to them. They took too much VC, shot for the stars, and missed -- the
social bookmarking Friendster. Alexis and Steve of Reddit should feel pretty
smart right about now.

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yesimahuman
Well, they supposedly have 75 employees, so maybe that says something about
how the company was run...

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vito
I like how they changed "one of us is going to leave the company" to "one of
us has to leave" and still treat it like it's a direct quote.

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pavs
By "they" I hope you are referring to Michael Arrington, who likes to call
himself a "journalist".

He is good at manufacturing news and stroking drama when there is none.

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axod
"...the fact that Digg has no iPad strategy"

Ah dear the iPad stuff just gets funnier and funnier.

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ojbyrne
I doubt this very much. People have been leaving digg in droves. Jay was fully
vested and probably bored.

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dnsworks
Jay founded Equinix. After five years, how could he possibly remain interested
in yet another news aggregator with gross revenues that are less than his
personal wealth? I just find it interesting that Rose is the new CEO. I've
always felt that Rose was an actor that Jay hired to play a part, in order to
feel like he was putting his film-school background to good use (which is also
the reason for the frat-boy fart joke tv show that Rose does).

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ojbyrne
It says "interim" CEO. So there'll be a search.

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frou_dh
I watched the most recent Diggnation podcast and Kevin Rose had a hell of a
time trying to figure out the difference between a megabit and a megabyte.

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nkassis
How many CEO can make the difference

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frou_dh
He's a creative guy but I thought he was supposed to have reasonable tech
chops!

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ojbyrne
You thought wrong. But a lot of effort (PR) has gone into making you think
wrong.

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_pius
cf. [http://mixergy.com/pr-lies-destroy-your-understanding-of-
how...](http://mixergy.com/pr-lies-destroy-your-understanding-of-how-business-
really-works-owen-byrne-digg/)

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dpritchett
Kevin's been effectively absent for a year and now is charging in with a mind
to rework the imminent V4 release of Digg. Sounds like a risky move; hope it
works out for them.

Edit: To clarify, I'm hoping that this move doesn't signal a second-system
mindset settling in at Digg HQ.

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snorkel
Quibbling over the delayed launch of Digg V4. Ahhh, the perils of waterfall
release cycles.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, the very idea that there's a launch of a _Digg V4_ with multi-year dev
cycles seems weird to me. Usually you don't do websites as if you're rolling
out a new release of Windows.

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smackfu
I can kind of see the point. Website users are infamous for hating change. So
it can be easier to make big changes / redesign, and then fix little things,
rather than to make small changes that are constantly getting pushback.

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_delirium
Hmm, I can see that reasoning, but I think it might overall be worse. If you
change a ton of things all at once, you do get the user gripes over with all
at once, but you also have less continuity than if you introduce a few changes
here and there. I'm not sure that a website wants to give users the retro
feeling they experience when they were used to Windows XP, installed Vista,
and now feel like everything's weird and different.

Admittedly that's wishy-washy, and I'm not against bundling up some amount of
changes into groups to roll out, especially since presumably some kinds of
changes depend on each other anyway. It just seems wrong if it's becoming a
huge thing equivalent to traditional product-release cycles.

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ssclafani
You can release a new version all at once and avoid user gripes by launching
the new version on a subdomain so users can get used to it. Digg did this with
their last version and probably will with V4. Facebook and Zappos did as well.

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kneath
Absolutely fantastic. I hope one day to be able to get into a hissy fit with
one of my co-workers and just stop working for a year (but still get paid).

~~~
nkohari
You might be able to get away with it if you own (at least part of) the
company. :)

