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Comment by vinhboy | Hacker News Reader

I am not familiar with the aftermath of the digg fiasco, does anyone know if they ever tried back peddling?

If it was me, I would return the site back to what it was, and apologize profusely...

That would mean admitting you were wrong. Better to blame it on others, blame it on bad technology, blame it on your programmers and blame it on your VP of Engineering. That is the way Kevin Rose chose to play it.

I think it is reasonable to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that Kevin Rose badly misplayed the situation.

Please read:

As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineeri...

This manages to be defensive and offensive and stupidly self-centered:

Kevin Rose Responds To Digg Criticism On Diggnation, Mostly Tells Users To Chill http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/kevin-rose-responds-to-digg...

Kevin tried to place a lot of the blame on Cassandra, saying the technology was not read for prime time, but the community pushed back in a big way and insisted that Cassandra was not the problem with Digg. If Cassandra had been the real problem, then Digg would have given up on it, but they did not:

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/08/digg-not-likely-to-give-up-on-c...

http://www.quora.com/Is-Cassandra-to-blame-for-Digg-v4s-tech...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669645

I'm not convinced that they want to backpedal at this point. They get the sponsored content and users that they wanted (or whatever it was the changes were that upset everyone). And frankly, the content is a lot better now than I ever remember it being.

they backpeddled much much later by 'reintroducing' some of the aspects of the site that were there before. Thing was, it was really quite a long time after all of the users had left. Initially, imo, the real problem was the shock of change and some serious downtime/bugs in the first 2-4 weeks is what killed it. As an active, dedicated user, not being able to use the site for so long left me no choice but to drop it from my daily habits.

IIRC, they did try to backpedal but by then they'd lost a fair chunk of their userbase, so they rolled out the new features again.

They had cleared most of the comments database, which is massive incompetence. I don't think they had any fallback plan.

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