51–60 of 124 posts
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The real problem is that v4 removed the illusion that average users had an influence on the rankings, without altering the fact that they don't.
Yeah, I may be blind, but how do you even get to the upcoming stories?
Is there any reason that Cassandra is the focus of this article? It is really silly and irresponsible to peg a nascent project like that without any reasoning or sources. I'm sure something changed besides just a Cassandra rollout, and wasn't Digg using it on v3 too? I think Cassandra is pretty well tested. There have been lots of super-large-scale deployments. It just seems lame to blame it on that, but I guess mayb…
So if you watch the Revision3 video where they talk about the stability issues Kevin throws Cassandra out there nothing really specific but when discussing downtime its the only technical factor he mentions. He calls it "still beta software" and states they were fixing bugs in Cassandra during the days leading up to the release of v4.
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The other problem is they have been hyping V4 for a long time by making beta testing invite only and hard to get. It would have been better if they can have a public V4 beta running in parallel with V3 since it is a rewrite.
you can't do a parallel beta test of two functionally different sites. You would end up with two separate data stores, workflows, and ultimately a confused user base. Never mind the fact that the user base is confused by the rollout. And never mind the fact that Google has forever damaged the term "Beta" in the minds of general Web consumers.
The general web consumer still thinks betas are a type of fish. Not really relevant to the median Digg user, though, since they are not the general Web user.
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Digg isn't a startup. It started in 2004 and has been mature for about 5 years. They are a business now. And a big one at that.
That depends on how you define your terms. I'm not sure a company that has been around 6 years and has ~100 staff can be called a startup any more. On the other hand, I'm not sure a company that still survives more on the wishful thinking of investors than on the money it brings in after 6 years can be called a business, either, and certainly I wouldn't call it either big or mature. I'm honestly not sure what I would…
Unless you are owned by a larger company that runs you at a loss as part of their strategy. Or stragedy.
Digg turned into nothing but a paid distribution and SEO engine anyway
Is there any reason that Cassandra is the focus of this article? It is really silly and irresponsible to peg a nascent project like that without any reasoning or sources. I'm sure something changed besides just a Cassandra rollout, and wasn't Digg using it on v3 too? I think Cassandra is pretty well tested. There have been lots of super-large-scale deployments. It just seems lame to blame it on that, but I guess mayb…
Placing all the blame on Cassandra helps Digg justify letting go the VP, since he was allegedly the guy who pushed it.
I get that some VP suggested a new buzzwordy technology, they gave him enough rope to hang himself and he did and left the company with a broken pile of crap. It could happen, if you have a healthy company you give trust to people. That it got this far doesn't speak well of the rest of management. It doesn't speak really well of the rest of the team either. Shouldn't there have been some circuit breakers or something?
Digg isn't a poor, bring-your-own-laptop startup. They've got resources, they've had substantial investment. They can afford to build and test software and I know of no real marketing reason they had to push something untested out. Rose could go out and say it wasn't done, it's going to take more time.
How does Rose keep his job? Wasn't he this VP's boss?
And it's single technology? That couldn't have been vetted and tested independently of all of digg? Really? And MongoDB, or hadoop, or one of the dozens of other nosqls wouldn't work, either? You do what you have to do and there is never a 'truth' with VPs and CxOs are canned, but it all doesn't float with me, just looks like another over valued and under talented company, got lucky and the blind squirrel found the nut, there isn't gonna be a second act.
Maybe it just seems low brow to me, name and finger the guy, blame the opensource tool you use, never explain or elaborate why you launched anyways when you were fixing bugs in the tool at the 11th hour.
Back then they seemed to have a rather sensible migration strategy (ie, basically running the new Cassandra back-end in parallel with the MySQL backend).
It seems to me that it was the v4 upgrade that broke, not Cassandra alone. It's possible their frustrations with Cassandra were more long term, and the fact the v4 upgrade didn't go well was the last straw.
For example, Digg has done a lot of work on Cassandra internals and tools. If you are using a new, open source product you kind of expect that, but it's possible the expense of that didn't seem like good value once v4 started to get into trouble,
Reddit runs on Cassandra + PostgreSQL. They use Cassandra as a key/value store and not as the primary database though.
They are planning to transition to Cassandra as the primary database. PostgreSQL is not used in a relational way on reddit -- it is used as a makeshift k-v store. You can take a look at this yourself as reddit is fully open-source: http://github.com/reddit .
do you have a source for that ?
> it is used as a makeshift k-v store
That is very true, they should switch. It just seemed like they had no plan to do so.
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For the 40m investment, I wonder how much profit they make. They seem to have a very large staff.
I have questions about what they're doing with all that staff, especially now that it's become apparent that Reddit is doing similar (if not larger) numbers with a handful of guys (literally, countable on one hand). Evidently Digg is better at the monetization game than Reddit has been, so more sales staff I can understand... but devs?