The Digg Team Is Going To WaPo, But The Assets Aren’t | Hacker News Reader

The Digg Team Is Going To WaPo, But The Assets Aren’t

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50 pointshornokplease19 comments

Rob Malda recently moved to the WaPo where he will be the Chief Strategist and Editor-at-Large working for WaPo Labs.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/03/05/202206/rob-malda-cmd...

So this potentially places the founder of Slashdot heading the Digg Team at the Washington Post.

Make of that what you will. (I'll note it is 2012, and there could be another MySpace acquisition in the works.)

Digg is one of those websites i used to use on a daily basis, it was my main source of news every day, now i forget it even exists until a story like this pops up.

The one thing that this teaches me is that if you have a web property with a decently sized user base, if you want to change things, do it incrementally and get feedback from users as you do it, rather than carpet bomb them with design and feature changes.

I just browsed the "Trending" category on Digg for all topics. Most stories have single digit comments. Ouch. Amazing how far the site has fallen since its glory days.

They are an extremely prominent example of Second-System Effect.

The irony that this hit the front page of Hacker News before the front page of Digg isn't lost on me. As a Digg member since May 11th, 2006 my heart is broken...

I was a Digg member the first day signups were open. A year later, without causing any trouble or even engaging in a single argument (and not submitting any content), my account was banned and I could not get in touch with anyone to figure out why. The most I got was "you were being offensive", which doesn't tell me what I said that was offensive. I signed up for another account, which was banned a week later without me posting a single comment or submitting anything.

I marked it down to me being on a college campus at the time and my IP might have been flagged (my campus got an IP ban from GameFAQs years earlier), but I never returned to the site. In my opinion, Digg was too involved in admin-moderating their community, which leads to a Google-like "no questions asked" approach.

I knew I had a Digg account, and your post motivated me to check how old it was. Apparently I joined Digg on 11/10/2005. I didn't even realize it still existed, to be honest.

Definitely sad.

06/06/06 Member Since

Still very respectable traffic on digg (as compared to reddit and HN): http://imgur.com/a/BMHXe

I'd be surprised if the WaPo (or someone else) doesn't step up to take it over.

I don't know how accurate those stats are though.

would it really be worth taking over the digg name at this point after the alienation of its users with the v4 disaster and subsequent migration to reddit. any benefits you would gain from brand recognition with the digg name would be more then offset by the negative feelings many users hold.

Very surprised to see that Reddit still has around a third of the traffic of Digg at its height.

Those stats are waaay inaccurate. http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/2-billion-beyond.html

Contrary to how Facebook/Google loves to do the acqui-hire, this is just the last part. Hiring without having to buy the useless company part.

It's a pretty ignominious end, though, if it does come to pass that Digg just shutters from this.

Will there be a Business Week cover story about Kevin Rose with the title "How this kid lost $60 million in three years"?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_33/b3997002....

Nah, that title probably won't sell too many magazines.

(This is a rip on BW's inflammatory, "let's ignore facts" writing style, not Rose.)

Reddit's site is ugly and the UI is horrible. I've tried to use it and it sucks. Plus there is so much childish crap on there. I remember first finding Digg in 2005, then they opened it up to non-tech categories. It was still good, because I could get the feeds for categories I liked. They added images and pics, and I filtered that crap out as well. Then v4 happened and use went down and the categories went very narrow and it sucked.

I really wish Hacker News had categories, but it would very hard to categorize things. Right now I have a massive filter on Yahoo Pipes, but of its no where near perfect. All I can work with is the title of the story to filter things and link.

This sounds like the sensible way for a company to pick up an attractive team. Picking up a junk product along with the team is a horrible thing to do to shareholders in my view.

Makes you wonder whether or not you just sell and run given the chance.

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