

Why Digg Failed - citizenkeys
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9214796/Elgan_Why_Digg_failed

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zalew
I'd add that it didn't succeed in creating it's own subculture. Yes, it was
very popular back in the day and lots of people were excited about 'digging',
but censoring content and alienating specific communities didn't let them
create something Reddit did - a loyal fanbase using their product in various
different ways. Redditors identify themselves with the site, while being
diversified among various sub-communities of interest - that's awesome. Also,
opposed to Digg, Reddit gives the choice to be anonymous - throwaway accounts
are what drive one of the most successful subreddits - IAmA.

Digg vs Reddit is an interesting case, where a technically similar idea is
implemented in a socially different way.

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seanalltogether
Honestly I think both digg and reddit are on cruise control now. Don't get me
wrong, I love reddit, but the leadership and passion are clearly gone, and it
may not take much for the community to unravel itself.

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wvenable
I think you're right, the top-level control of reddit is gone but the users
have almost completely taken over that role. Reddit recently blogged about how
IAmA is now the most popular subreddit and it was entirely a creation of the
community.

Reddit even has a strong female community which is rare for any of these sorts
of sites; again that wasn't created by fiat from the company but generated by
the users. Reddit just needs to keep the lights on and the leadership and
passion of the community will keep it going.

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fookyong
"All it needed to do was..."

I stopped reading right there.

Hindsight is 20/20 and this kind of talk really trivializes how difficult it
is to successfully execute - especially over an evolving landscape of 6 years.

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aamar
I find a lot of good insight in this article (despite the classically linkbait
title).

Absolutely, execution is difficult; there a ton of difficult problems to solve
on a site like this, e.g.: How can the system allow noobs to participate and
advance without incentivizing sock-puppets? Are voting circles good
(increasing participation) or bad (decreasing honest assessment/diversity of
content)?

No site is going to get it all right, but I think it's both appropriate and
useful to periodically assess: what are some of the Digg solutions that didn't
turn out to work as well as alternate solutions?

On a few points, the article doesn't persuade me, including the claim that a
twitter-like mostly-personalized homepage beats a community-wide homepage:
maybe yes, maybe no. But several other strategies adopted by Digg do seem to
be problematic over the long-term, and kudos to the author for highlighting a
bunch of relevant ones. Bigger kudos to reddit for pretty consistently
adopting smart solutions to these same problems.

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goalieca
I'm glad reddit went with a subreddit system. You see local moderators and
some passionate communities about their own domains.

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HaloZero
Discovery of these communities though is hard. Unless you are particularly
looking for a community (Maybe /r/sc2 or something). you don't really have any
tools to successfully find them. Most people still subscribe to the main
default subreddits reddit provides. Just an issue with having subreddits
without the appropriate tool to discover them.

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jedberg
An issue that we very much want to fix sooner rather than later.

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eyeforgotmyname
Maybe a periodic table of subreddits would help?

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jedberg
Yeah, something like that. But the trick is with 60,000 subreddits and more
being added every day, we'd really like to figure out a programmatic way to
generate it.

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keyle
I'm not sure we can say it 'failed' as it was a pioneer of many sites today.
It's also still very strong going and could easily sort out its mess.

To me, the major reason I got annoyed with it was the 'mob'. You had this
constant mob of people linking the same 'top 10 things something rather'. It
became a sensational headline front-page with no substance and no soul.

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electromagnetic
My problem with Digg was that the community became hugely negative, at least
it was when I got out. Nearly 2/3 of comments were getting knocked below 0 and
like 9/10 submissions got downmodded to oblivion by (I'm guessing) bots. I
knew people who would self-upmod using junk accounts simply to get their
submission to stay at 1 long enough to actually get genuine mods.

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protomyth
The funny part is that quite a lot of us out here wouldn't mind "failing" at
Digg's current traffic levels.

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ceejayoz
That sounds like a very 1990s dot-com boom mentality.

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protomyth
Really? When I think of the 1990s, I think of calling a site with decent
traffic a failure and needing to be in the #1 slot or bust. I think with
Digg's current levels you could make a good business of it while refining the
site or starting a parallel site. You need to keep costs down, but that is
something learned from the 90s.

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ceejayoz
You can make a good business at virtually any traffic level. I'd rather be
hiring and expanding at a lower traffic level than laying off and shrinking at
a high traffic level.

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protomyth
Yeah and everyone wants Facebook traffic, but you deal with the situation you
have a try to make back everyones money.

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ceejayoz
You don't want Facebook traffic if you can't make anything off it. In some
situations, investors might prefer a company fold than spend all the remaining
money trying to rescue the situation.

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erickhill
I can state unequivocally as an ex-IDG employee (IDG = Macworld, PCWorld,
ComputerWorld, InfoWorld, etc.) that Digg was a highly coveted yet nearly 99%
failed tactic to turn tech news into instant traffic "success". But that 1 in
a million chance of a "win" made everyone repeat that classic line from Dumb
and Dumber, "So, you're saying I have a chance!"

Once a new story went out, particularly anything Apple related, all friends of
the editor would be IM'ed within minutes to Digg It. Some editors had enormous
posses at their disposal that they would leverage "occasionally" to get their
story at least in the Hot Story block in the right-hand-column (which was
probably the equivalent of being on HN's front page for 30 minutes or so).

You can understand why so many editors grew to hate Digg. It made them feel
cheap about their "art", which had really become consumed by all things Apple,
Google and Microsoft.

Digg was the drug dealer. That elusive front page was the ultimate high few
could ever experience, but everyone kept trying to take a hit.

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joeybaker
What a great example of everything that is wrong with tech journalism today.

If you title something "Why XXXX Happened," I figure you've got about 3 grafs
to get to start your explanation. This article jumps from Arrington to Rose to
Twitter without even starting to dig into how such a hot product "failed."

Stop obsessing over celebrity and focus on information and analysis.

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nhangen
It failed? Last I checked the jury is still out.

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troymc
Indeed. It wasn't so long ago that Apple had "failed." Maybe the new
leadership will turn things around.

The founder doesn't have to come back (as Steve Jobs did at Apple); look up
what happened with IBM starting in 1993 (when they brought in Louis V.
Gerstner, Jr. as the new CEO).

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nethsix
It's interesting to read that 'collusion' to game the system is one Digg's
weak links. Many crowd-sourcing sites face the same issue. My guess is that
dealing with collusion requires balance between absolute crowd-sourcing vs.
some oligarchy. A balance which can be left to the user.

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jedberg
Or smart detection. :)

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nethsix
Yup, but it's not an easy issue as research, e.g., those in P2P, have shown. A
bit like the arms-race in anti-virus. Some examples of manipulation include
Jon Skeet on StackOverflow (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=784257>).
Letting users tune their trust has an advantage (hopefully) because given
enough configurability and a good UI, every user will different trust
configuration making the old adage true to a great extent; for an attacker,
"she can fool all people some of the time, some people all the time but not
all people all of the time".

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citizenkeys
Digg's fatal flaw seems to be their lack of an exit strategy. Digg avoided
being acquired, didn't go public, nor did they take any serious risks to
diversify their product offerings.

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a1g
With the amount of traffic that Digg had I don't see that as failing.

What was the harm of leaving it up anyway? (my apologies in advance for not
following the changes with Digg)

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Joakal
How come Digg still has a lot of hits despite a slow decreasing huge audience
and virtually no participation from such audience?

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getsat
Inertia? Try taking a break from a website you visit at least once a day. It's
really difficult.

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Joakal
It has been many months so far and Digg, much like Reddit; changes daily. Both
pride themselves on daily dynamic content. So to see people still going back
when there's virtually no activity doesn't make sense.

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known
Digg != Wisdom of Crowds

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jayo77
Stopped reading after the first page--Sites that separate their articles to
different pages to increase their pageviews ughhhhhhhhh

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jdludlow
One-page printer version:
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9214796/Elgan_W...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9214796/Elgan_Why_Digg_failed)

