

The Lessons For Facebook, Twitter And Reddit In Digg's Demise - ezdebater
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/07/13/diggs-power-users-explain-the-lessons-from-its-downfall/

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gfodor
Best point of the article is that you need to keep in mind your 'leverage' as
owner of a product when implementing large scale changes. In Digg's case, the
community had all the leverage: they posted links to content, curated the
content, provided the pageviews for advertisers, and spent the time making the
site great. In return, Digg had little leverage at all to cause users to stay
if they pissed them off sufficiently.

Facebook and Twitter have leverage: their content is user-generated, and
cannot be found elsewhere, this combined with their social graphs make it so
if you switched you will not be seeing content from a majority of the people
you know or care about any longer. Marketplaces like eBay and Craigslist have
enormous leverage: eBay can push out a feature that pisses off 100% of their
sellers, but sellers go where the buyers are, and the buyers are on eBay.
Google has leverage over its advertisers for the same reason, though it's hard
to think of how Google has leverage over its main audience, which is a
testament to their cautiousness when messing with the search engine (at least
until recently!)

I think this aspect is lost when you have sites like TechCrunch telling
product people to just forge ahead and break stuff. Break stuff, sure, but
remember that when Facebook break things and users eventually come crawling
back, its certainly not due to loyalty or warm-fuzzy feelings but due to
leverage. Do you have that kind of leverage?

~~~
lurchpop
The question of leverage can be an extremely difficult question to answer
honestly to oneself. that gets even harder when you have to show the
press/investors that you're staying relevant and continuing to evolve.
Innovation for the web tends to mean redesigns, which users hate. if you admit
to yourself that users have all the leverage, then you're taking away the go-
to tool to prove you're innovating. Most CEOs and product teams would rather
justify they're like Facebook or Apple in their own special way and do a shiny
new redesign.

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waleedka
My impression of Digg power users at the time was that many of them were
participating in voting rings to promote each other's sites and a few were
even making money pushing links to the home page. Not all of them of course,
but the few that did were ruining it for everyone. So I question the
conclusions that the article makes based on asking these power users.

I think that power users (the bad ones) were the root cause of Digg's demise
as they pushed bad content to the home page and forced the company to impose
more restrictions and limit communication (collaboration) channels.

On the other hand, Reddit reduced the potential reward for gaming the system
by 1. dividing the community into smaller subreddits, 2. Allowing down votes,
and 3. varying the time a link stays on the home page based on user feedback.
They did many other things better as well, but these stand out as important
differences that allowed reddit to control the spam problem better and keeping
the communities interesting.

~~~
floody-berry
All the top users on Digg aggressively dugg each others submissions, that is
undeniable. What's more, because of the "I'll vote your shit up if you vote
mine up" mentality, and the ability to easily follow users to see what they
submit and vote on, they also acquired hoards of normal users who would do the
same without reciprocity in hopes of joining the top ranks.

It would've been a fairly worthless currency if not for the blogspam networks
like Gizmodo, Engadget, Tech Crunch, Mashable, Cracked, Life Hacker, etc. that
sprung up to funnel Digg's firehose of users on to ad-laden pages.

While no system would be perfect, Digg's made it excessively easy to game
(maliciously or otherwise) and the content of submissions soon became almost
irrelevant compared to who was submitting it.

~~~
dredmorbius
That sounds very eerily similar to J.K. Galbraith's description of trader
collusion on the New York Stock Exchange in his classic _The Great Crash
1929_. In it he describes how traders would fix prices. The general public,
though aware of this, still participated in the market -- there was no where
else to invest, and there were some gains that could accrue to them as well.

In a sense, a stock exchange is also a sort of social network. Curious
thought, that.

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toddh
Some say you should have such a strong vision that listening to users stuck in
the past is a mistake. Others say shame on you for not listening to users, how
stupid. Apparently it's only OK to ignore users when it works out.

