Will the DiggBar instigator be fired?

http://counternotions.com/2009/04/14/diggbar/

by raganwald • 17 years ago

13 15 17 years ago

raganwald• 17 years ago

What happens to startup people who make serious mistakes and misjudge potentially debilitating risks to their companies and brands? What, for example, happened to the clever people who concocted Beacon for Facebook, the privacy debacle disguised as an advertising platform that comes once in a century? What happened to the folks who decided to build an architecture for Twitter that couldn’t possibly handle a real-time messaging system at global scale that nearly sank the company? Who at Yahoo thought it was a good idea to pay $5.7 billion to Broadcast.com in 1999?... The object isn’t individual punishment, of course. It’s a matter of ethics and transparency.

I call _bullshit_ on the statement that the object isn't individual punishment. If someone had a truly, tremendously bad idea, does that mean they are more likely to have bad ideas in the future? Maybe they just have more ideas, period, just as the programmers named in the most defect reports are often the programmers who write the most code.

Naming and shaming people can be important for cases of malfeasance. Although I detest the diggbar and other sneaky ways of eroding privacy, I am not sure that they are matters of moral turpitude.

And if you believe some things are deeply wrong, the author of this post seems to conflate creation of the Facebook beacon (a privacy issue) with creation of the diggbar (gaming a search engine) and with Twitter's architecture (optimizing a startup or speed to market) and with overpaying for an acquisition (behaving like everyone else during the last Tulip Mania).

mustpax• 17 years ago

The questionable ethics of scapegoating aside, comparing Twitter's scalability issues with a misguided feature is particularly pointless.

If you wanted to blame someone for a feature (if you're into that sort of thing), you could either go after the concept or the execution. Once you pick either of the two, I'm sure you could winnow those down to a few people and then flip a coin or something.

If you want to blame someone for an app that's not scaling, you're trying to tie down a completely amorphous concept to a single event. Do you fire someone because they didn't have the clairvoyance of realizing that some lock somewhere had too much contention?

Scaling is really hard; and like other dark arts, it involves a lot of sleepless nights, long stretches of despair punctuated by moments of pure joy. There's just no easy way out of it. http://twitter.com/Werner/status/1472242433

jgrahamc• 17 years ago

^Will^Should would make this an interesting discussion. Otherwise this is pointless.

rarestnews• 17 years ago

I stopped reading at "_startups_ like Digg"

websevenpointoh• 17 years ago

Although not a regular user of digg (for many of the reasons this site exists), I don't see what's so vastly intrusive about it. For a site that aggregates links, it's not totally nonsensical to frame the pages it links to. Also, clicking the 'x' in the upper right corner kills it immediately. I like the thought of being able to digg up an article as I read it rather than reading it, navigating back to digg and digging it.

Zev3• 17 years ago

Not everyone cares about Digg and wants to digg in the first place. If I don't want to digg or have anything to do with the site whenever possible, why should I have to see the bar?

Yes, it makes sense from Digg's perspective as a business. But from my perspective as a user, it sucks and I have a severe dislike for it.

dantheman• 17 years ago

You don't see the bar unless you go to digg, or click a link that some took from digg, without removing ti from the frame (not hard at all). And the person who linked it using the digg, link most likely thinks that adds value (ability to access the comments on that link).

Reddit's had this feature forever, I don't understand why people have a problem with diggs version.

overcyn2• 17 years ago

if you dont want to digg and werent on digg's website then why would you see the bar in the first place.

webwright• 17 years ago

Stupid, stupid idea.

First of all, ideas like this don't happen in startups without some sort of consensus or approval. If you're the founder/CEO and something like this happens, it better be YOU taking responsibility... Not passing it off on the person who had the idea.

Second of all, wild ideas are part of doing a startup. Some hit, and some miss. Slap the wrist of someone who comes up with bad idea and you make your entire team more conservative

brasidas• 17 years ago

The way to judge "firable" mistakes is whether the person was making a mistake based on the information that had available when they made the decision. The Diggbar was a bad decision made from bad principles and bad thinking.

Having an idea that fails is something else entirely.

mannicken• 17 years ago

There are so few people coming up boldly with new ideas and so many cowards in the world. I consider punishment for wrong ideas to be extreme form of idiocracy.

andr• 17 years ago

With all the DiggBar talk I'm surprised no one mentioned Facebook, which does exactly the same when you post a link on your news feed.

Will the DiggBar instigator be fired?

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