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by Andrex
1113 days ago
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Coincidentally, I've been going through Digg's history including v4 and their early history, because it's nostalgic for me. What people don't realize is Digg actually had four founders, depending on how you count them. Owen Byrne[0] has as his bio "The person who built digg for $1000 @ $10/hour, lol". Going by that, I don't think he shared in any equity. The whole site was bootstrapped for apparently $6000 total. People also think Digg turned down Google's $200 million offer, but it was the other way around. Google walked away after some due diligence. Knowing all this, Digg's fall seems kind of inevitable. That said Reddit never really filled that hole IMO. 0. https://twitter.com/owenbyrne |
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The real story is probably way more interesting than anyone really would guess. I'll summarise it as so:
What made Digg work really was one guy who was a machine. He would vet all the stories, infiltrate all the SEO networks, and basically keep subverting them to keep the Digg front-page usable. Digg had an algorithm, but it was basically just a simple algorithm that helped this one dude 10x his productivity and keep the quality up.
Google came to buy Digg, but figured out that really it's just a dude who works 22 hours a day that keeps the quality up, and all that talk of an algorithm was smoke and mirrors to trick the SEO guys into thinking it was something they could game (they could not, which is why front page was so high quality for so many years). Google walked.
Then the founders realised if they ever wanted to get any serious money out of this thing, they had to fix that. So they developed "real algorithms" that independently attempted to do what this one dude was doing, to surface good/interesting content.
They thought they'd succeeded, or market pressures forced their hand, whatever. So they rolled it along with a catastrophic UI/UX and back-end tech rewrite all rolled up into one.
It was a total shit-show. I was involved in the "old" MySQL stack, and watched them totally fuck it up with beta software that wasn't ready for production (Cassandra, at the time, was not what it is today).
The algorithm to figure out what's cool and what isn't wasn't as good as the dude who worked 22 hours a day, and without his very heavy input, it just basically rehashed all the shit that was popular somewhere else a few days earlier.
So you ended up with a site that was ugly, fuxed, no-one in the existing wanted, and with a bland boring bunch of stories on the front-page, which was not at all compelling for anyone new showing up to check stuff out.
Instead of taking this massive slap to the face constructively, the founders doubled-down. And now here we are.
To be clear, much of the tech behind Digg was very interesting, the work Owen and many other engineers did was very interesting. The algorithm was all smoke and mirrors, though. And Kevin and his little circle of buddies were all crap engineers that tanked the business with their hubris and inexperience.