Kevin Rose reflects on Digg, the dangers of outside investors, and his legacy | Hacker News Reader

Kevin Rose reflects on Digg, the dangers of outside investors, and his legacy

gigaom.com

62 pointsiProject44 comments

My thoughts on why reddit won: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle...

At the time, my open letter got me lambasted by the TechCrunch posse (badge of honor?), but I do hope all founders can learn from the digg story: http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose

Since Steve and I first learned of digg (a couple weeks after we launched) all the way to right now (as a board member) -- I'm always reminding myself of how little there's to be gained from thinking about competition. Founders, regarding competitors, be aware but don't care!

Also: one probably shouldn't publicly blow your nose on a competitor's shirt. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyqe7A5ombA&feature=playe...

> Since Steve and I first learned of digg (a couple weeks after we launched) all the way to right now (as a board member) -- I'm always reminding myself of how little there's to be gained from thinking about competition. Founders, regarding competitors, be aware but don't care!

I don't think people realize how rarely we talked about or looked at Digg in the reddit office. Every time I see founders who have a screen in their office dedicated to their competitors website I cry a little inside. Luckily it doesn't seem to happen often.

On a related note, something I saw or read recently made a point that "more companies die of suicide, than homicide." I think that's a pretty apt statement... well, maybe not "suicide" but "self inflicted wounds" at least.

As much as everyone loves to blame Digg v4 for Digg's failure I don't think that's entirely accurate. I definitely think that v4 sped up the demise, but Digg as a product was not what the majority of people wanted.

If you compare Digg and reddit the differences are pretty big, beyond the basic premise ("links that people vote on") Digg had a very big focus on news and "social" whereas reddit focuses on content, whether that's farmed from elsewhere or created by reddit users. If you compare the top 100 links from r/all vs. digg.com/all you can see a clear difference in content.

A Digg type site definitely has a place on the internet, as it's been shown Digg still has traffic now, I just think reddit was the natural successor to Digg, regardless of the mistakes Digg made.

I think reddit vs. Digg can be compared to Twitter. Twitter would never have worked in 2001, the internet just wasn't ready for it, but in 2012 it's doing incredibly well. The internet wasn't ready for what reddit is now in 2004. Digg catered to what people in 2004 wanted, but it doesn't cater to what people want in 2012. reddit succeeded because reddit is more of a platform than it is a website, it offers the basic framework for a community link sharing website but their focus was loose enough (with stuff like subreddits) that it was able to evolve with the internet. If that makes any sense...

I have always maintained that reddit let the content shine, where digg tried to wrap too much UI around the content, in the same way that Quora is doing today.

The digg interface, while clean for the first few weeks of viewing it, became a hindrance from providing information density.

Reddit allowed much more information and content density thus allowing a faster and more free flowing consumption of content.

Look at Quora today: you see that they have a weird UI wrapped around their content that makes the wrong bits of information stand out, the worst method of finding topics and an annoying auto-refresh that makes content jump when trying to read it, zero comment threading and depth, and finally and most importantly far too active heavy moderation/censorship.

Quora is only successful because of the early adopters, but in time it will fall to the side as digg did, when the first generations of its users move on and the UI becomes far too obvious how bad it is for consuming lots of information quickly.

I was just thinking the same thing a couple days ago. Reddit feels like you're hanging out a bar with friends but also meeting new people. Quora feels like a salon where librarians shush you if you speak too loudly.

I think the difference is that reddit can be exactly what you want it to be, to an extent. Or, rather, of the 100s of communities on reddit, you only have to belong to a select few of them if you so desire, and the kinds of communities you can find on reddit are vast, varied, and uniquely interesting.

This is exactly what makes reddit so great. I don't have to look at pictures of cats and rage comics if I only want to se stuff about programming/technology/etc.

This also allows it to evolve. Some sub-reddits with reddit enhancement suite installed are more like pinterest.

“don't take too much financing” is a recognition that Digg v4's failure (and you should look at Alexa graphs to see how significant that was) was due to ignoring the community to give investors the site they thought they wanted.

An incredibly astute observation - it also serves to show that the investors didn't know beans about how to make the product successful, but were pushing for the changes anyway. They are still out there telling startups what they 'should do', even as we read this.

I find the whole we (investors, "founders")/they (non-generalists who can't move up and down the stack) kind of jarring, especially since I somehow managed to fall into the gap between founders and employees. Programmers are generally opinionated, especially about the domain they work in. My impression of Kevin's problems with programmers when I was there (inception to October 2007) is that they gave him too much shit, criticized his ideas, and generally created hassles for him (all good things, IMO), and he didn't really handle that well (IMO). Forget "moving up and down the stack," they wanted to _architect_ the stack.

If you're non-technical and come back from some conference and say we're now rearchitecting in Rails/Node/Brainfuck/whatever cool new tech you just heard about, you're probably going to get some pushback. And that pushback, from the other side's perspective, could be presented as "you're just a non-generalist who can't move up and down the stack."

Its important to remember that Kevin isn't really technical.

I know little to nothing about Digg and even less about Kevin Rose, internal drama, et al... however, hiring people who are locked into certain technologies, especially non-optimal ones like PHP, seems to be a bad idea.

My point was that nobody was locked into any language. But if you have a large complex website with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, the company is somewhat locked in to the language. When some non-technical executive mandates that we're all switching to language X and everything is going to be rebuilt from scratch, you will get some pushback.

“We ran into these huge problems, and didn’t have generalists who could go up and down the stack,”

I'm sure this is a cherry picked quote, but it surprises me that he thought the technologists he hired had to do with any of their problems other then performance. Sites like Reddit/Digg/HN live and die by the community they frame. The communities seem to accept an unusually high down time. As Reddit started becoming more mainstream it benefited from segmentation. HN, has benefited from a foundation of considerate users, which are given more privileges then newer users. Digg allowed bad users to dilute good users until good users broke down and decided to seek refuge outside of the site.

This just feels like blame shifting to anyone but himself.

If they needed generalists, why didn't he hire generalists? My understanding is V4 was a mishmash of numerous technologies and all along, it sounded like there wasn't a vision for how the pieces would work together.. just a vague goal.

> Rose also said that Digg hired individuals with very niche skills, like developers who only knew PHP and were not as useful once PHP went out of use.

"v4 would have worked out if only my employees were smarter" is a pretty classless and delusional assessment of what went wrong.

I was a developer at digg from 2007-2010, and I can say his statement is just flat out wrong. Digg did hire great PHP programmers, but that was because they were great programmers, overall. Every single one of them moved, with ease, to other languages when required. In fact, a majority of the backend of v4 was written in Python.

It's also interesting to note that most ex-digg engineers primarily work in a language other than PHP currently.

Really? He touches on 1 of the problems he encountered with digg and you interpret this as Kevin throwing his employees under the bus?

He's been throwing his employees under the bus for over a year now. The site was written in PHP by PHP developers. Somehow that wasn't good enough so he pivoted and replaced them with C++ developers.

Anyway, I liked Digg. Then then newer users got involved and stories they didn't like got buried. The first time I used it the articles were technical and really interesting. Then it got political, stupid memes, etc. In its default state I think it was better than Reddit. Reddit is great but you have to work on it. Clean your browser cache and look at reddit like you're going their for the first time. What do you see? Crap from r/AWW, r/atheism, and r/politics take up all or most of the frontpage.

> He's been throwing his employees under the bus for over a year now.

Yep: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2352521

It wasn't the execution that destroyed Digg, it was the ideas behind v4. It's a remarkable case study in what not to do with a popular community website, and pointing to technical mistakes is just deflection. Maybe the developers were terrible, but that still has very little to do with why Digg failed.

Then unsubscribe from those subreddits and subscribe to those that appeal to your interests. Manicure your own content a little bit.

As a new user, how do you know that it's good enough to be worth logging in and investing the effort? The default front page is your initial impression, and it does not appear like it is likely to attract interesting people to talk to in its current state.

Depends on how they got there. If they just typed in reddit.com in the location bar, you may be right. But I bet a lot of people find the site via a deep link.

> ...news they’d seen on Twitter, rather than news they might have previously seen on Digg.

Reddit, for the most part, does not have this problem - reddit is about the community and the discussion, not about the MLP. Maybe Rose still doesn't understand (or maybe doesn't want to admit) why Digg failed.

> Rose also said that Digg hired individuals with very niche skills, like developers who only knew PHP and were not as useful once PHP went out of use.

If you own a startup, and you're hiring the kind of programmer that only knows one language, you're already making some pretty big mistakes.

>reddit is about the community and the discussion

This is very true. While you might look at it and think it's any other "news"/"meme" site, it is actually a large community made up of smaller, sub-communities, devoted to a very wide variety of topics. My Little Pony? Covered. Nonsensical technical babble? Covered. London? Covered. Obscure Japanese visual novel? Covered. AMAs? Covered.

I think this is why reddit continues to grow and stick around. People aren't just there for the jokes, they are there for the community, and the communities which match their interests.

>Nonsensical technical babble? Covered.

I hope you're not referring to http://www.reddit.com/r/vxjunkies. I'll admit it is a bit hard to follow for the layman, but it's generally a great resource full of smart people and insightful discussion.

Sorry, that was from a common perspective.

VXJunkies is a great source of information, particularly regarding recalibrating voqueon deltas.

(MLP: Mindless Link Passing, a term that I think originates from kuro5hin)

Propagation, but yes I should have defined my abbreviation.

Propagation

I like Rose. In a lot of ways he represents the best of my generation of entrepreneurs more than Zuckerberg and anyone else in that era. The fact that he keeps working, and seems to always have something new, is inspiring and in a way, motivates me to do the same.

Pownce was ahead of its time. Had it been released in 2011, it would be a viable twitter alternative. I guess that's what he was getting at with how he wants his legacy to be seen.

How can he possibly be the best when everyone one of his projects have failed? I also admire him, but lately he seems better at angel investing and spotting other peoples successes than building his own.

Is being an entrepreneur more about winning or persevering?

Surely most people want to be a successful entrepreneur...

And Kevin Rose hasn't been successful? How long does a company you started need to live on after you've left for it to be considered successful (Digg)? Was Digg not the go-to, poster-site, of web2.0 a time? Is that not a success?

Generally, a company's purpose is to make money. Digg lost $40 million. How is that a success?

I was responding to "Is being an entrepreneur more about winning or persevering?"

> Had it been released in 2011, it would be a viable twitter alternative.

It was a viable twitter alternative when it was released. One of the reasons they closed shop (acquired) was that they couldn't compete with Twitter. How would they do better in 2011 when Twitter was so entrenched in internet culture?

The way I see it, what went wrong with Digg was the amount of influence "superstar" users had on the stories that make the front page. The fact that they kept and displayed the "ranking" of users just shows how this culture of superstardom is ingrained within Digg mechanics itself. It may not have effected the traffic or growth at the time, but it did affect the quality of stories highlighted. Digg knew its system was being gamed and I think that is what pushed them to make the changes they did on v4 (apart from the money), where publishers were given priority over individually submitted stories.

To be honest, I think at some point the user-base and comment section just became too much for me. There was a certain strain of conversation that everything inevitably devolved into, and I left and I know a lot of other people left when that became too much.

This applies to every social community once it gets popular, though. The front page of Reddit used to be tolerable, for instance.

Although I've never really been a reddit user, I can see your point. It's an interesting question: how do you actively maintain a culture of respect, thoughtfulness and two-way dialog?

This is one of the few spots I've ever seen it on. As a newcomer to HN, I find it very unique. Great resource.

" ... when we sort of put out a word that this was up for sale [...] there were spam sites wanted to make it a link farm, and a bunch of properties that would have really screwed things up"

Yeah, that would've been terrible compared to what actually happened.

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