Digg freezes manual story submissions as user anger mounts | Hacker News Reader

Digg freezes manual story submissions as user anger mounts

venturebeat.com

89 pointsssclafani60 comments

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.

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

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"

(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.

It's descended into mob mentality. Everyone just wants to watch it burn. I'm sure they'll have a sizeable chunk of readers left by the end of the week, but as for contributors and discussions, it might as well be a ghost town.

"You have died of dysentery".

I think its a bit early to be writing obituaries.

This is a problem, but Kevin is attentive to his users and I'm sure they'll get through it ...

PS: Left digg a 2 years ago now, but I like their new design better than the last.

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??

What your users want is almost always what is best for the company.

(Note that what your users want is not always the same as what they say they want.)

What your users want or what your customers want?

If it was me, I'd be doing what they're doing - putting back the lost features, and trying to assuage disgruntled users.

I think the people in charge stopped thinking about what's best for the company long ago in favor of what's best for themselves. That also needs to be reversed.

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.

I don't think there is any coherent point that the users want. Some want V3 because they don't like change, others want unicorns, others want to have fun burning Digg to the ground. I'd love to see it succeed, but I seriously doubt it will.

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?

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.

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.

I disagree on two points. First,the Facebook changes were IMO made in the best interest of Facebook/shareholders first, users second. Also, I can easily imagine Facebook without the News Feed, in fact it's my least favorite part of it and most of my friends's least favorite part. And to answer your question: Digg thinks they are serving Digg/their shareholders. They think the changes are in their best interest, which they may soon reconsider.

This is the problem with raising so much VC money, especially at a post-$100 million valuation (and dreams of an IPO). There's no way Digg can get the revenue necessary to repay their investors (or even be profitable with their bloated staff), without having to resort to actions like these. Having just a skyscraper ad isn't going to cut it.

By essentially allowing their sponsors to decide what's going to be on their front page, they've changed digg from a crowdsourced editorial board to a sponsored RSS feed. I can't remember the last time a .com made such a shortsighted decision....I can't see digg even being around in a few years after this.

When ever Facebook changed something what the site was about did not change. Facebook did not go from an open social network to a Linkedin type site where you can only post resumes.

Digg went from all about being user submitted content to an RSS reader where a lot of posts are auto submitted by blogs and ends up on the front page.

One thing different about Facebook is that there are no real alternatives to Facebook, but there are plenty of alternatives to Digg. So it's easier for Facebook to make changes that users don't like, because where are they going to go?

I'm not a startup founder (yet). If I start a company it will have paying customers, not "users", so I wouldn't have that dilemma.

Facebook stood their ground for a few changes that users didn't like. For example, users hated the newsfeed when it was introduced. The newsfeed is now one of the most important features on Facebook.

The only big feature that I can think of where Facebook backed down is Beacon.

It's important to listen to users, but Facebook has shown that it's also important to ignore them at times.

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.

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

http://twitter.com/kn0thing/status/22560188509

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.

..and another one falls to second system syndrome.

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

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.

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

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

I get almost all my news from HN, but that's not necessarily bad. If I was LOOKING for news, and using it AS A NEWS SOURCE, it would be. But I'm not- the news just sort of comes along for the ride.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

Absolutely. Most who complain about Reddit just haven't discovered or don't use the subreddit feature.

Rule #1: Unsubscribe from the Front Page reddit, and Politics and Atheism (even if you're atheist) subreddits if you're subscribed to them.

Then go find the good ones.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Iterate" means "repeat".

That's great, but to be clear:

Release - Ship it, get it out there for public consumption

Iterate (on your release) - Refine what you just shipped however you see fit (bugs, missing features)

Repeat - Ship what you've refined and begin iterating on what you've released

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.

...years...

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.

I very much doubt they can do that. What they seem to be doing is adding the features of v3 back into the new architecture of v4. Not fun.

I continue to find this funny as digg users file into other sites, reddit included, and talk about how great it is compared to digg, how happy they are that they "switched".

Number one, digg's story quality tanked during version 2 and the comments went along with it. Version 3 brought an even more broken commenting system, and more of the same run of the mill storieds. Version 3 also brought in some ridiculous lag, that for whatever reason, managed to post articles from Engadget, reddit, etc days later. Digg was the place to get tech news. With version 3, it was the place to get reddit's news from 3 days ago.

Now with Version 4 there are auto submitted "publisher" stories. This is what's causing people to jump ship? Frankly, if that's the reason they're leaving digg, I hope they stay away from the social news sites I'm on.

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?

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

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

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.

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