Why Digg Lost #1 Spot to Reddit

by nashpjev • 16 years ago

66 40 16 years ago

That was a bit hand-wavy. The basic thesis seems to be that Digg asked the wrong questions. Slow down champ, don't get too specific.

brianpan2• 16 years ago

And comments Rose made defending the design after the fact are going to try and spin a positive light. That's not "misinterpreting the results". Internal discussions may have been very different.

michaelchisari3• 16 years ago

Digg lost to Reddit because they thought you could have a community-driven site which sidesteps the community to cater to advertisers.

So the community left. And felt so betrayed, they salted the earth behind them.

siglesias2• 16 years ago

It also happens to be a community that chooses content that repels 99% of the population, so it was an understandable objective to try to sidestep them, if growth is the objective.

Requested elaboration: "Digg was never able to diversify content (read: expand, scale, grow) because it was never worth it for minority voices--and here I'm referring to non-liberal, non-young, non-male, non-athiest users--to attempt to carve out space and participate."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1831431.

Looks like we've had this debate already, Michael! I think the particular niche that Digg has chosen (rather, has chosen Digg) is common knowledge. It's hard to escape the conclusion that minority voices were actively suppressed there and that Digg had two routes: niche sub-diggs or a personalized Twitter-like experience that didn't function like old-Digg. The revolt was predicted, but the technical problems that would make it easy for new users to play with it were not.

navyrain• 16 years ago

I think this flippant comment requires some proof to be taken seriously. Its hard to believe digg got to where it was by being repellant to 99% of the population.

michaelchisari3• 16 years ago

I agree with @navyrain, this has [citation needed] written all over it, but I'd like to ask this question:

What would a community driven site that wasn't repellant to the majority of the population look like? Humans are so non-homogenous and diverse, that the greatness of the internet is found in it's ability to be a collection of niche communities, not a place where catering to the lowest common denominator is the only route to success.

axod2• 16 years ago

Until Reddit posts a decent profit it's not clear either of them really 'won' is it?

Digg tried to monetize and drove away their users. I'm not sure Reddit has really tried to monetize as much yet apart from their 'donate' thing.

michaelchisari3• 16 years ago

If Reddit makes enough to pay the bills, maintain steady paychecks, and keep their users happy, then maybe a huge profit margin isn't necessary. If they can continually do that, that may mean a longevity that few corporations could claim, let alone internet companies.

The great thing about reddit, also, is that it's structure lends itself to accommodating niche communities. If you don't like the Pics subreddit, you read the Funny subreddit instead. If you just want to read about Harry Potter and Ruby on Rails, you can, and you can pretend the rest of the site doesn't even exist. This minimizes the possibility that a shiny new site will attract users away.

If Reddit can keep the lights on, the employees paid, and the community diverse and satisfied, then I'd say they've "won", and I don't think large profits are necessary.

As an aside, I also wonder if web 2.0 has really proven itself, outside of a few exceptions, to be generally profitable the way valuations show that investors expect it to be.

redthrowaway3• 16 years ago

The founders already cashed out, so now it's Conde Nast's problem. They don't really seem to notice Reddit, so Reddit just putters along. I'd say it was damned successful, with Ohanian and Huffman cashing out within a year. Everything since is just gravy.

planckscnst• 16 years ago

I really don't think it's the monetization that drove people away. I left because I found the content to be increasingly bland, repetitive, and irrelevant.

Estragon• 16 years ago

I haven't followed reddit in years, and reddit.com's not letting me log in to search for the posts where I raised this speculation, but I think that any business which controls a website like reddit has a huge marketing advantage. I saw some high-scoring posts which I believed didn't merit much attention and which seemed to be shilling for Conde Nast products. So they may be getting value out of the site without explicit monetization.

3dFlatLander• 16 years ago

Do you remember the story that Kevin Rose started digg with 500 bucks (or some such amount)? It wasn't until I watched the mixergy interview with Owen that I found out that was false. While that wasn't betrayal, it did leave a bad taste in my mouth. The motivations for making a PR fabrication like that are pretty obvious, but it just didn't sit well with me.

colkassad• 16 years ago

I used to enjoy listening to This Week in Tech until they started focusing on Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga. I still listen because I genuinely like Leo Laporte's presentation and personality. However, I am disappointed with him and tech journalism in general in how they covered Digg's downfall. They really didn't cover it at all. I really think they turned a blind eye, hoping that things would bounce back because they apparently gained so much traffic from Digg. I understand Digg still gets decent traffic so maybe they just don't want to make things worse.

To me it seemed to be a big story. Kevin Rose was on TWiT a couple episodes ago and they hardly mentioned Digg's problems. Journalism indeed.

krakensden• 16 years ago

Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose worked together on The Screen Savers many moons ago, they're probably friends at this point.

QE2• 16 years ago

Aye. The cast of TSS has remained pretty close. I don't listen to TWiT anymore, but I remember Patrick Norton used to be (may still be) a regular guest.

portman• 16 years ago

That's an understatement: Leo effectively discovered Kevin. I'd bet that Kevin asks Leo to be godfather to his first-born child.

I remember listening to the TWIT episodes around the Digg V4 fracas, and I thought Leo made it very clear that he would be unable to cover the story without bias.

Also, TWIT is an opinion show by its very nature. It's the tech equivalent to an OpEd page in a newspaper.

DupDetector• 16 years ago

Duplicate:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2009244

1 comment there.

easyfrag• 16 years ago

Has anyone written a good post-mortem of the Digg v4 debacle yet? An old fashioned expose built on interviews with the people involved, I reckon there's a lot of lessons around building and maintaining a community in there. These "Top X reasons this happened" posts can not do this subject justice.

Lewisham• 16 years ago

I think you'd need to wait for the people involved to leave their jobs. I'm not sure Adelson has shown too much willingness in talking either. There's not a lot to gain from it.

sfrench• 16 years ago

There really is an interesting post-mortem to be had, but I'm just not sure you're going to be able to interview employees to get it. The most candid talks happen between employees in IM conversations and over beers, and likely won't be hashed out online.

I loved my time at Digg. I worked on some great things, learned a ton, and yes, came out with some cautionary tales that will serve me well through my career.

redthrowaway3• 16 years ago

People keep thinking that Digg lost to Reddit because of v4. This is flat out wrong. Reddit had passed Digg in most metrics months before the redesign. It had been steadily gaining users for years, whereas Digg had been steadily losing them since at least January.

Personally, I think the subreddit system did its job. It was put in place so the site could scale without losing its community feel, and I think it's done that admirably. I've long since removed most of the major subreddits from my frontpage, added a bunch that interest me, and now it feels like a fairly small site that's perfectly tailored to my interests and sensibilities.

chime• 16 years ago

Absolutely. Originally, everyone wanted subreddits to be like tags, myself included. But overtime I've realized how awesome subreddits are (even though it is a pain to have multiple subreddits covering the same topic). But now that I've subscribed to some wonderful subreddits, I love my personal reddit experience (/r/doctorwho, /r/askscience, /r/linguistics, /r/skeptic).

Everyone talks about having a personalized experience on the internet, from Netflix & Amazon's recommendations to customized dashboards but nobody has got it right except for Reddit. When I go to reddit.com homepage, I only see what I want and if I don't like a subreddit, I remove it from my list. I don't ever feel like reddit is going down the hill or that the olden days were better. It really is a community of communities.

brianpan2• 16 years ago

Making the same point a different way- A lot of sites don't really have a compelling reason to login, except that you're forced to login before you can comment. With reddit, I want to login- to see more than the default frontpage, to see replies, etc.

ojbyrne2• 16 years ago

I don't think it was v4, but that was the final slap in the face. Basically there was so little progress from 2006 (v3 was released in June 2006) to August 2010 that whatever they did had to be world-shattering. And it was the opposite.

chrisaycock• 16 years ago

> I think the subreddit system did its job.

It's interesting to see Stack Overflow take the same approach with the Stack Exchange network. I'm betting that will pay off over time.

radioactive21• 16 years ago

digg was losing to reddit well before all of that. It is actually why I think they took such a huge (and in hindsight stupid) risk with the design. The way they implemented the new design and how they reacted to users frustration that was the last straw.

I honestly think whoever was in charge got pressured and acted with money and greed in mind instead of the actual users. Karma is a bitch.

Kilimanjaro• 16 years ago

Digg lost when it became Reddit's front page. Pure garbage.

Reddit won when they diversified their front page into groups. I rarely visit the front page now, only programming, coding, webdev, python and javascript groups.

Noise levels were reduced almost to zero.

BonoboBoner• 16 years ago

'cause they took a big fat shiaat on their users. nuff said.

insight• 16 years ago

hmmm... Compete.com says that while Digg lost 17%, reddit gains only 2.6%

kingsidharth• 16 years ago

They lost because they failed to understand what problem they were solving and redesigned the whole system (and site)which targeted to solve some problem that they couldn't.

Why users went their was some games, some content and personal communities and power-play (that's my view of it, it could be different) and then they tried to make it user centered like twitter - which solves entirely different problem.

Now if I can't do what I used your site for, why would I use it anymore?

tomelders• 16 years ago

Digg started out for me (a long time ago) as a place where I could "discover" the "stuff" that interested me with a minimum amount of noise from the stuff that didn't. Eventually though, it became broader in it's appeal and my own private little corner of discovery became infested with memes, lolcats and motivational lolsters. I was tiring of Digg by this point and the redesign simply made it easy for me to jump ship. Then I found Hacker News and I couldn't be fucking happier. Void filled.

Digg isn't losing to Reddit, the market for that kind of site is shattering into millions of tiny little peices. Hacker News is one of those tiny little pieces. Stack Overflow is another.

Why Digg Lost #1 Spot to Reddit

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