The second thought was that ground-up rewrites are almost never a good idea to begin with. You end up throwing out whatever's good about the old property along with all the bad, and risk turning off the members of whatever user base you have left (who presumably stuck around because they saw something they liked in the old version).
I suppose the population of Digg users is probably small enough at this point that the new proprietors aren't worried too much about whether they stay or go, though...
> That totally depends on your available toolset and experience.
That's either ignorant or boastful (or both). Any decent programmer will admit that they can't build a good and scalable anything in a week from scratch.
If you count your "toolset" as an entire framework that does what you want already, then sure, maybe it's possible. Otherwise you're just being foolish.
Not really though, everyone knew that V4 was a terrible idea and they simply went forward without caring much for the community. I mean what kind of marketing research could you do to prove that using promoted stories is a good way to build a community?
"Promoted Stories" myth needs to end. It wasn't the case, there was a severe bug whereby a Regular Expression only matched RSS content. The Regular Expression acted as a gateway into the Popular Algorithm. I worked at Digg and I fixed that bug.
It wasn't noticed before launch because we echoed the v3 popular stories into the beta version of v4.
Digg was never paid for stories hitting the frontpage. And for all the flack it gets for this myth, it should have been.
Well the fact rests, the community generally believed that there was a ton of promoted stories because, you guys never told anyone otherwise or did a poor job communicating.
And im certain promoted stories did exist, I remember them clearly marked as that.
You can find a research firm to tell you anything you want. They may have to torture the numbers more in some scenarios than in others, but there's no shortage of people willing to take your money in exchange for telling you what you already want to hear.
The second thought was that ground-up rewrites are almost never a good idea to begin with. You end up throwing out whatever's good about the old property along with all the bad, and risk turning off the members of whatever user base you have left (who presumably stuck around because they saw something they liked in the old version).
I suppose the population of Digg users is probably small enough at this point that the new proprietors aren't worried too much about whether they stay or go, though...