[laberge]

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?

[SupermanScott]

"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.

[laberge]

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.

[SupermanScott]

Digg ads existed that were placed in the feed at slot 3 and 14 which were introduced in v3: http://about.digg.com/blog/ads-you-can-digg%E2%80%A6or-bury

They were ads that were pieces of content. Digg was in front of this trend with promoted tweets / stories.

[nowarninglabel]

If you don't mind me asking, how good a job do you think John N. did? Did the buck stop with him on this engineering project?

[smacktoward]

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.

[laberge]

True true, but as we can see, that doesn't mean it'll help them succeed.