Everyone makes mistakes in the early days of startups and digg was no exception.
If you're here, you've probably heard that Ycombinator favors determination over talent. I kept the site up and made things work with extremely limited resources.
I'll second this. Owen's code was bad, because it was a large hack. It was a hack that worked. It was a hack because he had limited resources. He was ONE GUY coding, administering, doing everything up until something like 8 million users. That's not easy. The code was bad. So fucking what. It worked.
So with that, I say Owen is a good coder.
Kevin never understood tech. As Owen says, he's just a guy who looks good on TV. Now he's throwing all his good coders under the bus because he fucked Digg up with his grand V4 vision, and he's trying to point the blame at others besides himself.
"It's a low move, Kevin. Low move. We supported you. We took the blame when we fucked up. We never pointed the finger at you. So take the blame when you fuck up. Asshole."
Sincerely,
The guy who kept DBs running for Digg for 4 years.
Sadly I can't see this going well. Reddit generally makes a big joke of how much Digg [supposedly] sucks. I don't think it would be generally a fulfilling experience for the AMA subject or most onlookers. YMMV.
If you're here, you've probably heard that Ycombinator favors determination over talent. I kept the site up and made things work with extremely limited resources.