How the Digg team was acquihired

In my role as unofficial, self-appointed late-stage Digg historian [0], it's my belief that Digg ultimately had to change as the Google SEO changes had fatally wounded its near-profitability. Further, as a VC funded company it made the inevitable (and I think best for everyone involved) decision to modernize in an attempt to be a member of the Facebook, Twitter cohort rather than experience a long-term shrinking into mediocrity.

[0]: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/

And reddit is doing the new thing. Their new design caused me to leave, even their "old." subdomain is pretty bad.

Didn't really need it in my life anyway.

The Hail Mary strategy as described in the first couple paragraphs of TFA makes it pretty clear that senior leadership didn't understand social, at all. "A friend clicked on it" (not even "read it") is such a weak signal I'm sure FB's algorithm promptly buried the links for lack of click through.

I feel this way about a lot of television shows.

Heroes is a great example. The first seasons was amazing, the 2nd season was hot garbage. They had no idea what made the first season so great.

But was it by accident? They had a template to work from. The original idea behind Digg was to fix what Kevin perceived was broken with Slashdot. They did that. Mission accomplished. Could have been a fine small/lifestyle business for years. Taking VC cash and everything that necessarily followed was what killed them.

> Their downfall is thinking they actually knew what they were doing and therein lies their problem.

I read an interview with the PlentyOfFish founder and he alluded to this.

People would ask him why his site looked so bad compared to other dating sites. He said he he was afraid trying to make it better would make it worse. In reality he didn't know why people liked his site so much but it was working.

So he ended up working a couple hours each morning checking for spam and paying bills and took the rest of the day off instead of trying to constantly "improve" the site.

There is a great parallel to this in filmmaking. Some of the greatest films took unexpected turns during production, often forced to change in major ways due to accidents, scheduling conflicts, budget, or last-minute ad-libs which become central themes of their characters. In a number of films, those unplanned additions turned out to be key to the success of the film.

One specific example of this is The Other Side of the Wind, by Orson Welles, in which Welles noted the existence of this magic phenomenon and deliberately sought to make a film centrally driven by happenstance and unscripted ad-libs. In other words: trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

It is famously also one of the only well-known startups where the initial version was built by offshore outsourcers, like "exception which only highlights the rule that outsourcing sucks".

Don't change a thing that is working just for the sake of change.

You can see this for successful small family restaurants, they usually don't have a lot of choices and usually do little things very well and stick with them and can last for generations.

I remember the days when mr babyman and friends controlled the digg front page and all the drama that followed. It was a perfect example of an over aggressive parasite killing the host. Reddit solved it by creating sub-reddits. HN solved it with clear rules and diligent mod work.

> Once the users realised they had little sway in getting a post to the front page they left.

The only reason they left was because there was an alternative - reddit. If reddit wasn't around, digg would have a captive audience and they would be as big as reddit today. Reddit now has the same problem with power users + corporate/news/think tank/political party affiliated subreddit mods with heavy censorship. Fortunately for reddit, there really is no alternative. Also the same thing with youtube. People complain about censorship and mainstream corporate nonsense being peddled on reddit, youtube, etc, but they have nowhere to go.

If digg had waited a few years til reddit folded or they had a secure monopolistic position, they would be relevant today. Digg made the same mistake myspace did, piss off their users with a viable competitor around. And once the migration started, it was over.

It’s a job. I worked for a startup that was burning out and got acquihired. I just left and got a new job, but a few friends stayed because they wanted some form of stability. They got a pretty minimal retention bonus to stay on for at least six months, I think it was under $5k.

Benefits are for the founders. For employees, its just another day. No need to go for job hunting immediately.

Does it count as a liquidity event? So if you have options and hang around through the acquihire, you get to exercise them?

I have been part of an acquihire. As an early stage startup employee you work really hard for years, take salary cuts and hope that some day all the hard work will pay off. All of it will be for nothing if there isn't some kind of success/validation. In this case Digg was fairly well known but you don't get much credibility in the job market if the startup was never in the news. So if there is any form of acquisition, you get some of that brand exposure. In my case, even though we had built a great product, I rarely got inbound calls or interest in public forums. Now people reach out to me even when I haven't spent much time in the new company

> that's leverage.

Yup, when Pixar went public, Jobs decided to keep 100% of the shares. (You could argue that he deserved it, since he spent the majority of his fortune on Pixar and Next.)

So his 4 top managers threatened to quit and derail the IPO.

So they got shares, but no other employees did.

I check it a few times throughout the day, but idk if it can really be compared to reddit anymore. There aren't any discussions, so it's basically just a more focused manual Google News.

Often it seems Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Google News, FB, even local newspapers are just are recycling the same content.

There is usually some form of compensation attached to it that must be returned if the employee doesn’t satisfy their obligations or is deferred so that the employee is incentivized to stay at least that long. You can quit if you really want to, but you might not want to return the lump sum signing bonus you received a few months ago. Or you decide to stick it out for a year at which point you receive stock.

Sorry, I think that sentence was a bit unclear. What it meant to convey is that we had 200 daily active Facebook uniques, essentially that very few folks used FB to connect to Digg.

Probably the latter. Once you have that big a userbase + not much competition it's hard to go down unless something catastrophic happens.

a lot of early reddit came from digg

every community in the history the internet falls to eternal september at some point

One thing that really made reddit different from the other communities that were a thing in its early days was the insistence on wholly-separate subreddits rather than the various overlapping tag schemes which were trendy at the time on delicious, fark, digg, LJ, etc.

I don't know if spez and kn0thing had some special insight about this, but my experience with it over the long term has been that you can be subbed to a few reddits for your preferred niche interests, and enjoy almost complete isolation from whatever toxicity is going on over in r/politics or wherever else (barring the occasional bit of brigading, which is basically just a mess for the smaller-community mods to clean up).

So there's clearly a large number of mainline users who basically just read whatever reddits are default on the logged-out homepage. But I think there's also a super long tail of users who don't read those at all, and my hunch is that it's that long tail of users who have probably sustained the site over the long term, and will continue to give it a lot of resiliency going forward.

There is a post on HN right now about predictions for the next decade. My prediction would be Reddit dying/overtaken by another site in next 2-3 years.

I think Digg/Slashdot/Myspace/Friendster show that on the Internet you're never too big to fail. If someone comes along that does it better right as you make some big blunder (redesigns that primarily cater to advertisers are a common issue) you can lose your userbase seemingly overnight.

Non-competes, probably, are the easy way. Accusing the potential acquirer of acting in bad faith also happens.

Also, a loyal and cohesive team can do the "we go together or we don't go" move.

>Why does the new company not approach the lead engineer and the selected employees directly?

I'm guessing it's because tech is a small-ish world and no acquiring company wants to burn bridges (with the VCs) by doing that.

Yes, the fall of the original Digg happened long ago.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-acquires-digg/

At the time Digg was acquired in name only. The team had a short period to replace the then current (and very expensive) infrastructure and hijack all traffic. They did a pretty awesome tech job of moving to AWS and stopping the bleeding from the then in place bare metal setup. I remember a tech talk where they spoke of the money they saved from moving to AWS, it was substantial and allowed them the resources to try to save the product. Since then it was a re-birthed startup with a new team that had quite a long runway IMHO.

I remember Digg Labs produced some really cool animated real-time visualisations of stories on the site.

A little Googling suggests that they were collaborations. But I wonder if the data scientists were also involved

http://v1.stamen.com/clients/digg.html http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=585

I’d like to know why it took them dumping logs into hive to see the traffic came from one article.

I think these two “data scientists” were probably called webmaster or sysadmin and it took them coming in the next morning and grepping the log files. Or looking at google analytics which existed at the time. I don’t remember if real-time was free in 2010, but it could easily tell referrals and passthroughs.