

Digg Makes a Play for Relevance, Increases Front Page Speed 75% - jdrucker
http://www.jboitnott.com/2011/03/digg-makes-a-play-for-relevance-increases-front-page-speed-75/

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PaulHoule
It doesn't matter how fast it loads or updates if it reads like a bizzaro-
world version of the headlines of the magazines at the supermarket checkout.

------
Dramatize
BTW he is talking about the frequency new articles appear - not page load
speed.

~~~
lwat
So he's twitterizing Digg? I guess it could work.

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citricsquid
I'm probably bias as I really dislike the whole "social media" thing going on
with the internet right now (the sort of crap mashable covers) but I see this
as proof that "social media" is a fad and that _real communities_ which have
been around since the dawn of the internet are where the real growth and
stability is.

Reddit is a community, always has been, it took time to grow but it has grown
and is now flourishing, Digg is a social media site, where the focus is not on
discussion or sharing cool things, it's about driving page views to other
sites, the discussion and sharing links became a side part of it.

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zaidf
Digg is like that once-cool friend who goes all weird overnight leaving his
buddies wondering 'WTF happened?'.

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kunjaan
The front page was pretty fast, but I keep getting a weird error that won't
let me proceed to the next page.

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/317805/digg.png>

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JakeSteele
is it just me, or after they changed the layout, 90% of the users left for
reddit, so it would make much more sense if the speed boost would've been
1000%?

~~~
fossuser
At that point they didn't have any users worth keeping anyway. The community
had degraded to the point of irrelevance a year or two before the redesign. If
anything the shift to reddit just harmed reddit.

~~~
ajarmoniuk
Happily, subreddits help alleviate this 'content inflation'.

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protomyth
Did I just miss it or is there no actual link to digg in the article? I expect
that crud out of the newspaper sites, but it seems odd there.

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SolarUpNote
Wow, they finally took my advice and changed their layout back! :P

~~~
rsoto
Yours and the world's as well.

I don't care how fast they claim to be now-- whether if it's true or not.
reddit is down at the moment and I've been reloading like crazy for about 2
hours. I think there's a lesson to learn there.

~~~
codexon
Reddit has always had way more downtime than digg for as long as I can
remember. People left digg for reddit because of power users and the last
straw of serving as an RSS feed for big name websites.

If they have the brains to go back on these 2 changes and maintain the same
uptime, there's absolutely no reason why they would not be able to surpass
reddit again. Reddit is not without its share of problems:

    
    
      - frequent downtime
      - censorship and squatting of subreddits
      - censorship of random subreddits like atheism
      - shadow banning of random articles

~~~
redthrowaway
What makes you think there's any real censorship? Mods are free to censor
whatever they feel like. When people get sick of it, they form a new
community. See the /r/marijuana to /r/trees migration that occurred a while
back for the most famous example.

Shadowbanning from the site is really only done by hueypriest. If a mod
shadowbans you, post elsewhere.

As far as downtime, they have __three engineers __. One programmer, and two
sysadmins. Raldi just left for Google. Three engineers for 1.1 billion
pageviews. Give them a break.

~~~
codexon
\- What makes you think there's any real censorship?

See the atheism debacle. They tweaked the "algorithm" until it stopped showing
up in the top 10 (requirement for frontpage). Try submitting an anti-haskell
article in proggit. It will never show up.

\- Shadowbanning from the site is really only done by hueypriest. If a mod
shadowbans you, post elsewhere.

Post elsewhere? The difference between the front page and a random unknown
subreddit is 20k or 10 viewers. Articles can be "shadowbanned" because of
their faulty anti-spam system. The main problem with shadowbanning is that
people don't even know it is shadow banned until they start digging, so good
stories get stuck in limbo.

\- As far as downtime, they have three engineers. One programmer, and two
sysadmins. Raldi just left for Google. Three engineers for 1.1 billion
pageviews. Give them a break.

They had uptime problems far before 1.1 billion pageviews. Read the The
Mythical Man-Month. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month. 3 engineers is more
than enough for this type of website. If it isn't, then they should've stopped
adding features.

~~~
redthrowaway
>3 engineers is more than enough for this type of website.

Sorry, but you lost all credibility right there.

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clistctrl
I love the example Reddit has made with the Digg/Reddit war. Mostly in that it
was never a war. I remember hearing their response when they found out about
digg was something to the affect of "oh interesting" then continued on.

~~~
nopassrecover
Digg was popular well before Reddit, and I was always given the impression
that Reddit was established as an ultimately successful Digg competitor.

However, your statement prompted me to do a little research. Here is Alexis'
(reddit) story:

"This is a good chance for me to dispel any rumors. We were living in a veil
of ignorance for the first month or so at Reddit. We were working our asses
off, my co-founder Steve Huffman and I, building a site that we got online,
and then two weeks into the site being online we found out that there was this
other site called Digg, that had venture funding and it had been out for quite
some time."

Source: [http://mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-
wa...](http://mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-was-built-
with-alexis-ohanian/)

~~~
kloncks
With all due respect, I really don't buy that story. I'm a fan of Digg _and_
Alexis.

Paul Carr said it best: "So at best they did zero research before they
launched Reddit into a space that kinda relies on the founders knowing where
to find cool new stuff online."

~~~
skeletonjelly
Does it really matter in the end? It's not the idea, it's how it's executed
right?

~~~
nopassrecover
Well claiming complete non-awareness of the popular competitor just seems a
little odd. It would be kind of like Mozilla saying they weren't aware of IE -
sure execution is all that matters, but it's curious why you'd say that.

~~~
arn
Digg wasn't a "popular competitor" at the time. It was an unknown competitor.
TechCrunch did a first profile on Digg 5 days before Reddit launched. I'm
going to assume reddit took more than 5 days to build.

<http://techcrunch.com/2005/06/18/profile-digg/>

So is it that absurd that they started on Reddit without knowing about Digg?
For that matter, TechCrunch wasn't that popular either in 2005.

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unohoo
who cares ?

