
Digg freezes manual story submissions as user anger mounts - ssclafani
http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/30/digg-freezes-manual-story-submissions-as-user-anger-mounts/
======
sdh
Broken axle? The whole cart has caught fire, the horses have fallen over dead,
and the settlers have gone elsewhere. Digg v4 is a ghost town.

~~~
ronnoch
Reddit's logo today has the alien carrying a shovel... almost as if they're
going to "bury" Digg.

~~~
zacharypinter
The tooltip for the logo (I think it's one of the gold addons) says "pardon
our construction: we're digging around for new logos this week"

~~~
AgentConundrum
_(I think it's one of the gold addons)_

It _was_ one of the gold addons, but reddit is using the gold subscriptions as
sort of like buying early access to beta features, rather than as a set of
purchased features. When new features are built, gold members get first access
to them, then when they're solid / when a new batch of new features comes in,
the old gold stuff goes public and gold members get access to the latest
features first, ad infinitum.

The logo title text was rolled out to public users last week, when reddit
introduced a feature to gold members allowing them to have new comments added
since their last visit to the page flagged as such.

------
vinhboy
I asked this in the other thread already, but let me ask again.

So as startup founders, what do you guys think is the right move here? Do you
do what your users want, or stand your ground and do what you think is best
for the company??

~~~
rwmj
If you've only got 30 users and you're aiming to get millions, then you might
consider "standing your ground" (although even this situation is dubious -- it
seems almost always better to build).

But as Digg has millions of users already, what your users want is the same
thing as what is best for the company. You say sorry and revert back to the
old site, then have a long hard think about what you did wrong and how to
avoid making that mistake ever again.

~~~
webwright
I disagree. They have millions of users and their growth is flat-- but they've
raised enough money that they really can't afford to be flat.

They need to see if they're being attacked my a vocal minority or a true
majority. If it's the latter, a revert should happen. If the former, they
should consider standing their ground.

See every major change Facebook has ever done. When people exploded about the
privacy implications of having a news feed (Oh no!), should Facebook have
punted?

~~~
Lewisham
I think there's a very strong difference between Facebook's changes and
Digg's. The changes to Facebook were most definitely what the company thought
was best for the user. Lots of people don't like change, but Facebook stood
their ground and said "we did this for you, you will like it in time." Which
the users did. Can you imagine Facebook without the News Feed?

The changes to Digg are very questionably for the benefit of the end-user. I'm
not sure what Kevin and Digg hoped to achieve by having publishers directly
spamming the Digg front page with content. It's a very rudimentary, very poor,
RSS reader, and the anti-thesis of what Digg was about, user-selected stories
from all over the web. I can only think Digg are getting an affiliate kickback
from the larger publishers.

I'm not a disgruntled Digg user; I abandoned it for Reddit about 3 months ago,
and I haven't looked back. It seems to me the small Reddit team know their
users pretty well (see the way they handled Prop 14 without the need for a
user revolt). I honestly wonder exactly who Digg think they are serving with
v4.

~~~
enjo
Isn't it just a matter of time until Digg is in the same monetization
conundrum? They're limping along right now, but at some point you have to
think Conde Nast is going to say "alright.. make some damn money already."
Reddit gold isn't going to do that on a large scale.

I fully expect to see a similar scenario play out on Reddit at some point.

------
pavs
Wow. Just checked out the new site. (I actually like the new design) ~80 of
the links right now are link back to reddit.com.

Crazy. No wonder reddit was slow as hell the whole day today.

~~~
skeletonjelly
I hear there's holidays or returning from holidays in the US for
schools/colleges as well? My information may be wrong

~~~
pavs
<http://twitter.com/kn0thing/status/22560188509>

------
teyc
Let's unpack this:

v4 has a host of changes

1) new code 2) ranking algorithm 3) ui

The new code and ranking algorithm are intimately tied. The key problem is
that any election-based website has a single "correct" view, making phased
beta difficult, but not impossible. This is complicated by the fact that Digg
is a startup, and doesn't have infinite amount of money to solve this.

So, ideally, what is required is

1) a parallel run of the two algorithms, measuring some subjective quality of
the results. (e.g. click throughs) 2) Notifying users that personalisation is
being progressively turned on. Thus, breaking up the audience into cohorts
(i.e. no single true view). 3) Using Eric Ries' style AB testing to
continually tweak and split test, rather having a big deployment.

------
gfodor
..and another one falls to second system syndrome.

~~~
ojbyrne
Except of course that it's, oh, 4th system syndrome.

------
dstein
I got almost all my news from Digg for the past 3 years. Watching Digg self
implode like this is somewhat sad to see. It is fascinating, and scary how
fast it happened. And I think Digg is in pretty serious trouble here
regardless of what steps they take now, or whether they deserved it. The
userbase seems intent on kicking them into the ground now.

I think their primary mistake was tying an infrastructure change with a
complete recoding of the site. It appears they didn't even had a backup plan
of going back to the old site in case "something" didn't go as planned.

~~~
ronnoch
> I got almost all my news from Digg for the past 3 years.

Wow. That doesn't seem like a good thing.

~~~
dstein
Why? On average I found Digg's slice of news (current events + comedy + tech)
pretty appealing, and it's format was better for skimming the news a lot
better then the other aggregate sites -- including HN. I also got very
comfortable with Digg not being "real time", such that I never had to seek out
the news. Rather than trying to read everything, and follow every story from
beginning to end, I just wait for the good stuff to bubble to the surface, and
then I skim over just that.

~~~
Devilboy
It's never a good idea to get all of your news from just one source.

~~~
dstein
Digg was a news aggregate, it includes from many different sources.

------
mdolon
I see it happening but I don't fully understand it. Digg v4 has been in beta
for weeks now, if it is as bad as people are claiming it is now shouldn't that
have come up during the beta period? And if it did come up and if the changes
have been this protested even in beta, they're pretty dumb to try and force it
over anyways.

Anyways, one thing @kevinrose did Tweet correctly is that this isn't the first
revolt on Digg. Chances are it'll blow over like the other ones but who knows,
maybe history won't repeat itself.

~~~
seanalltogether
The thing is, the previous revisions didn't represent a disruption to the
community itself, just certain members within the community. This latest
change effectively sends the message "the community isn't important, what's
important is the readership".

I think what this revision failed to take in to account is the 80/20 rule. If
digg loses the 20% that drove the community, the remaining 80% might not like
what's left behind.

------
danilocampos
I'm done with Digg.

There's way too much noise and not enough material that I genuinely care
about. The community mostly sucks -- I read everything with comments sorted by
upvotes.

Last week, when my hand-picked Digg RSS feeds stopped working, I deleted them
from my reader and moved on. For me, at least, Digg's time has passed.

------
say_
This is very disappointing. These community sites like reddit and the old Digg
are great for finding funny and unusual content, but they are very poor for
discovering new content tailored to specific interests. Twitter is barely
serviceable for this purpose, but there's also a lot of fluff.

I was projecting my hopes of personalized content discovery onto My News, but
it looks hopeless now.

~~~
drivebyacct2
You couldn't be more wrong. Reddit's subreddit feature is it's best, most
underutilized, and most ignored feature -- especially by its side seat
critics.

(edit, it's/its)

~~~
esdi
You're so right. I used to think reddit had deteriorated until I discovered
subreddits. Some subreddits have very high quality and relevant content.

~~~
bmm6o
Reddit has to solve this problem if they want to grow. The fact that
"unsubscribe to front page" is the best advice for new users is ridiculous.
They would be much stickier if they could figure a way to automatically
determine what subreddits would appeal to a person.

I can't believe "beg for money" was higher on their idea list.

~~~
_delirium
That's probably good advice businesswise, but as a user I sort of like that
people aren't really thrown into subreddits. The fact that the smaller ones
(not on the front page by default) only have people who went out of their way
to find them keeps them a little higher quality imo, and keeps the influx of
new users at a manageable pace.

~~~
bmm6o
I see where you're coming from, but "new users should have a worse experience
than those who've cracked the code" is not a viable long term strategy.

------
jcromartie
I don't understand why users of services like Digg get so indignant about
downtime. It's a _free_ diversion.

~~~
ojbyrne
I understand your point, but people have itchy back buttons. They'll bitch for
a bit, and then they'll leave. The people who should be getting indignant are
the people running the company - it is an advertisement-supported website
after all. Downtime = lost revenue.

------
quinndupont
Somehow Kevin Rose has become the Web's babysitter. Product launches are hard,
and having revolting factions of whiny Diggers has got to make it nearly
impossible.

------
flipp
I think its getting pretty close to time for a revert back to Digg v3. Look at
google trends for Reddit vs. Digg. When something's a failure, its a failure.

~~~
mcgraw
Release. Iterate. Repeat.

But at a pretty hefty cost. Definitely wasn't ready for prime-time, but it's
here and they're going to be pretty busy over the next month or so re-
integrating v3 philosophy and stabilizing the new back end.

~~~
flipp
This wasn't an iteration. This was changing pretty much the foundation of the
site in a massive redesign they've been working on for months.

~~~
mcgraw
That was a magnified iteration on many levels which people are not used to
seeing -- design, philosophy, code. They didn't simply release a new look,
they released what they believe is fixing what they felt was broken in prior
versions, ie., left/Right wing bury machines, power users.

Ultimately, they released a product that wasn't ready for public consumption
despite being in Beta for several weeks. Had their algorithms worked
effectively, preferences to change the default behavior existed, and a stable
back-end in place we might be singing a different tune.

------
cletus
Personally I think Digg is now in the same bucket as PointCast, if not to the
same degree: they should've sold when they had the chance. Now they're
basically irrelevant.

I mean just look at the language when Digg talks about your home page....
people still have home pages? Really?

------
siglesias
4 in Chinese culture is bad luck because it sounds like "dead." Apple's been
there too this year.

~~~
lotusleaf1987
So are you implying this is coincidental or do you actually believe in
superstitions?

~~~
siglesias
That it's coincidence, obviously. If both Apple and Digg had launched v.13 of
their products, with problems, then people would be more perceptive to it.
Just imparting a little bit of culture, that's all. For those that don't know
(and who knows, you might find it useful some day if you launch something in
China), 4 is China's 13.

