> Oh wow. Wow. I hereby revoke my previous statement. These are some God-awful infrastructure decisions. Version control and a staging server are the most basic necessities for a scalable dev project. I even set them up when I'm working on a personal project, alone.

Exactly. This seems to follow the Kevin Rose formula: make horrible decisions (or be entirely absent from decision making) without any understanding of technology, then blame your developers and technology choice ("Digg V4 failed to due to Cassandra").

If it weren't for Facebook's success, I can bet you'd see people blamining PHP for Digg's failure: prior to Facebook, P in LAMP also stood for Perl (and occasionally Python) and LAMP wasn't "universally" considered proven (unlike J2EE + Oracle or .NET + SQL Server), nor has Facebook been even remotely close to a "vanilla" LAMP site (since at least 2005)-- with many mission critical subsystems also being built in Java and C++ .