[simonw]

Presumably you're talking about this - https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ - "Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity"

Did you read the title of that post and not the actual content? Because it's a fantastic insider's war story about one of the most infamous product launches in our industry's history.

Here's the conclusion, which you can count as justification if you like but seems like a very interesting piece of insight to me:

> Digg V4 is sometimes referenced as an example of a catastrophic launch, with an implied lesson that we shouldn’t have launched it. At one point, I used to agree, but these days I think we made the right decision to launch. Our traffic was significantly down, we were losing a bunch of money each month, we had recently raised money and knew we couldn’t easily raise more. If we’d had the choice between launching something great and something awful, we’d have preferred to launch something great, but instead we had the choice of taking one last swing or turning in our bat quietly.

> I’m glad we took the last swing; proud we survived the rough launch.

> On the other hand, I’m still shocked that we were so reckless in the launch itself. I remember the meeting where we decided to go ahead with the launch, with Mike vigorously protesting. To the best of my recollection, I remained silent. I hope that I grew from the experience, because even now I’m uncertain how such a talented group put on that display of fuckery.

I can't imagine how reading that could make you think they were less rather than more credible as a source of information on engineering management!

[viccis]

This is like claiming that one of the North Korean nuclear scientists is credible on atomic bombs after theirs immediately fell into the ocean. Presiding over a disaster doesn't give you some magical insight on why you completely failed.

[simonw]

He didn't "preside over a disaster". He was a recent engineering hire who joined two months before the launch.

[viccis]

I dunno, he was one of two people in charge of one of its biggest technical disgraces (capacity management). That's pretty bad. But what's worse is that he thinks that actual product changes from 3.5 to 4 were good ideas, and that's enough to make me categorically question his judgment.

[simonw]

I didn't see anything in that story that suggests he was responsible for capacity management.

His argument in favor of the changes was that Digg was at risk of going out of business and needed to take big swings to try and turn things around.

[viccis]

>I didn't see anything in that story that suggests he was responsible for capacity management.

I'm referring to this:

"The week before launch, the capacity planning project was shifted to Rich and I."

>His argument in favor of the changes was that Digg was at risk of going out of business and needed to take big swings to try and turn things around.

At the end, yeah. But this statement earlier was fairly uncritical:

"promised to move us from a monolithic community-driven news aggregator to an infinitely personalized aggregator driven by blending your social graph, top influencers, and the global zeitgeist of news"

It sounds like he thinks more that it was a failure to execute than that it was a complete bastardization of the core purpose of Digg that brought people to it. Digg v4 was doing algorithm slop far too early and crudely and overtly. It was enshittification without all the lubrication to get users to accept it like Facebook and others did.

[simonw]

You're right. Here's the full context:

> At one point, an ebullient engineer had declared the entire rewrite could run on two servers and, our minimalist QA environment being much larger to the contrary, we got remarkably close to launching with two servers as our most accurate estimate. The week before launch, the capacity planning project was shifted to Rich and I. We put on a brave farce of installing JMeter and generated as much performance data as we could against the complex, dense and rapidly shifting sands that comprised the rewrite. It was not the least confident I’ve ever been in my work, I can remember writing a book report on the bus to school about a book I never read in fourth grade, but it is possible we were launching without much sense of whether this was going to work.

> We had the suspicion it wouldn’t matter much anyway, because we weren’t going to be able to order and install new hardware in our datacenters before the launch. Capacity would suffice because it was all we had.

Given that description I'm not ready to blame the capacity problems exclusively on Will!