RIP Digg

She just completely throw Digg's work into the trash like useless fastfood plastic bag.

This is what happens when you don't know how to create anything productive in your life, and you spend your days talking sh about other's people work. I don't care if Digg is losing visitors, it was a new concept back then, and it was successful, show some respect for the people who are/were still working for it.

I'm seriously hating TC everyday a little more.

" And Digg? Well we got Digg exactly right. We said it could sell for between $150 million and $200 million, and over the next few months and years there were several negotiations and at least one solid offer in that exact range. But Digg — unlike peers like Flickr and Delicious– said no, and its best days seemed ahead of it."

Presumably she is talking about the google talks, because that would be the only "solid offer" in that exact range. And guess what, it was google who walked away according to Techcrunch.

http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/26/google-walks-away-from-digg...

_Exactly Right_

Is she talking about the same Digg that had the founder on the BusinessWeek cover?

Edit: Fascinating, this very writer of the blog post put him on the "controversial" cover. And then she wants to talk about a time when kids weren't seduced by "easy cash." Defies logic, really.

Much of what she does have to say about Digg and the history of Web startups is questionable (for example, "The entrepreneurs were the exact opposite of the kids today seduced by the promises of Y Combinator, easy cash of super angels and lure of TechCrunch headlines. They were doing something that still stank of broken dreams and evaporated billions. And they were doing it for one simple reason: they couldn’t stop themselves.")

Sometimes TechCrunch does well (particularly when it gets a real scoop) but "R.I.P. Digg" is poor, in my opinion.

I remember when I created an account on the site. A friend kicked a link my way from Fox News of all places ... that mentioned the site alongside Slashdot. In my job at the time, crowdsourced sites focused on technology were very useful. I left the site about a year after they decided to open up to general news. My fear was that it would become what many of the emerging Web 2.0 news aggregation sites became: a political activist haven. Within several months (not overnight as I had feared), it had ceased being a useful resource. The breaking point was when there was no way to configure my profile to filter out crap-political-commentary. I wrote them to have my account removed (something that couldn't be done with a few clicks at the time).

I had taken it out of my daily "sites to check on" in 2007, but after reading some commentary about how "all of the Web 2.0 sites had become BIASED! (OMG!)" in early 2009, I visited the front page (now without an account with filters setup). The top stories of the day were dominated by nearly everything that a former female candidate for vice president had made.

I love Hacker News because despite its growing popularity, it has maintained civility and avoided (most of the time) entries focused entirely on politics.

I hear Reddit is hiring engineers...

150-200 million is a lot for a company that seems to have earned very little if anything. It's one thing for a Groupon to walk away from a deal, but Digg should have cashed out.

I'm hardly ever on Digg anymore, but I am Hacker News a lot. I'm not sure if Hacker News was ever constructed to be a business - seems like it was just designed to be an interesting place for people in the community to get together and share information - and that's just fine. Not every great idea is necessarily a great business.

I don't know if it was spam or all the format changes, each time a format change occurred users complained - a lot, yet changes were implemented anyway.

The highlight of Digg's history I'd say was the HD-DVD encryption key everyone put in posts refusing to back down I think that brought the users together.

Then one day the user-base seemed to suddenly shift rapidly to the right almost overnight from a more centrist point of view, that cause a lot of friction and comment wars.

Telling the people who use your website, some of who practically lived on the website, what they should like and not like design-wise instead of listening to them was disastrous and may have been the cause of Digg.com being abandoned by most of its user-base.

I used Digg for a while, and it became apparent over time that the quality both of the news and also the comments was tanking. Once I discovered HN I stopped using Digg altogether.