Hacker News Reader

Comment by boyter | Hacker News Reader

I don't really get all of the Digg hate recently. It seems that Digg has a perception problem similar to Windows Vista.

Sure they made some technical/communication/process mistakes, but they seem to have fixed most of the ones that are easily fixable.

I personally find Digg more useful these days because of the changes.

View on HN

This is not a small technical mistake as you put it -- especially since trust plays a crucial role in user's perception when they are using Digg. If digg is using such shady practices and cloak them as 'testing', its basically a slap in the face of the digg devout users.

Digg users appear to be a thin-skinned, shrill bunch to be honest. Perhaps it's just a vocal minority.

They made people mad. What's not to get?

Yes I get that. But why are they still getting grilled? The screwed up, admitted as much and started fixing the things that were broken. What more can you do in that situation.

no, they screwed up, then told everyone that they knew better....then when they lost their business, they admitted that they screwed up.

why they are getting grilled now? because once you become the bad guy, even the smallest stuff gets blown out of proportion...and let's be honest...this isn't exactly small

I think the issue is the community that grew around Digg was very spiteful in general and felt quite entitled. I don't think it was Digg's fault per say, but the entire community involvement angle made the user base feel they owned a part of the site and were entitled to have a say, rather than the reality in that they were using a service and being sold as eyeballs for advertising.

And considering digg is an open forum the loud people can be very loud.

They specially groomed their community to be like that, too. The entire theme of digg, Kevin's shows, etc., is a kind of fratboy softcore-geek elitism.

I was at a Digg Live at FoWA in London a few years back and it couldn't have been more different than the conference experience. It was swarming with loud, misbehaving teenagers (and I mean 13- and 14-year-olds, not 17- and 19-year-olds).

No wonder their audience takes every chance to screw with them now (and that vocal portion of the audience convinces everyone else, looking in at it from the outside, that it's important and meaningful).

The live Diggnation episodes are pushed as being better than the normal ones, but a crowd of people screaming and jeering and dumb drinks promos don't make for a good podcast.

I know part of the charm of the Diggnation podcast is that it's kind of dumb, but you can only go so far!

I agree, they messed up. They've also been pretty good about trying to improve communications with their users in the past weeks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com