I don't doubt that something can be done with it, but I'm dubious of Digg as a brand these days. Similar to MySpace, it's lost all the credibility it once had.
Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
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Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#22I used to love digg in the early days. People point to the v4 revision as being the final nail, but they started wavering and losing the magic literal years before that. FWIW, Pligg (the digg clone CMS) looks like it's getting a twitter bootstrap upgrade. I've been wanting to roll my own "digg/reddit/HN" for ages. Maybe now's the time. http://www.pligg.com/demo/
I had a pligg site setup a while back for 'sci-fi' news. It was a fairly poorly implemented PHP application at the time and not nearly as clean and neat as Digg. However, that demo shows that they have been putting a lot of work into it since then.
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#23The only reason it's $500k and not $0 is to save a small amount of face. Digg is losing money, and has never made money in its entire history, so it's going to cost Betaworks a lot more than $500k to take it over.
Digg bleeds money because they're overstaffed for what they do. Reddit ate their lunch with five paid people, while Digg was employing dozens. I think they had over 100 people on staff at their peak. Even now, when reddit has an order of magnitude more traffic than Digg ever had (1 billion+ pageviews a month), reddit runs with a staff of about 10 people. Digg probably still has a whole lot of dead weight, even at this point when the whole thing is only worth two and a half good developers salaries.
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#24The first iteration of digg looks awfully like reddit.
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#25From WSJ: "The price was just $500,000, three people familiar with the matter said—a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230437380457752...
"None of Digg's remaining employees will join Betaworks as part of the acquisition." what did they acually buy? The know how? The technology? None of that is revolutionary today. And there is no community on digg right now whatsoever (unlike /. which still lives its own life). Maybe the name is worth something, but I don't really think that it matters that much.
Well, Digg still have a lot of visitors, is a well-known page with high PageRank (8). So for only 500.000, I consider it a good deal.
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#26the trouble is that fixing Digg means getting rid of the existing user base
What existing user base?
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
That WSJ article attributes Digg's fall from grace to "rivals like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc." and makes no mention of the Digg v4 redesign disaster. That was what did them in more than anything. EDIT: The story has been updated with a new paragraph, "A series of redesigns..."
It was going downhill long before v4 IMO.
There was point, years before the v4 redesign, where 90% of the content hitting the front-page was supplied by 100 or so so-called "power users". Of that 90%, probably 40% was supplied by Mr. Baby Man himself. Hitting the frontpage was an impossibility unless you went around friending other users and building up your network. A worthwhile investment if you were doing social media professionally but for the average user they had no voice except in a comments section. After I realized this I moved onto reddit and never looked back. Of course reddit has suffered it's own unique set of consequences from becoming the kid on the block.
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#28Why? Reddit is like Digg 2 now. Back in the day Digg was for dudebros who wanted to swap girls gone wild links while Reddit was the "isn't Haskell grand?" place. But since about 2008 or so when Reddit rubbed up against Digg and 4chan and a big chunk of their user base rubbed off and clung to it, Digg has been made wholly redundant.
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#29I used to love digg in the early days. People point to the v4 revision as being the final nail, but they started wavering and losing the magic literal years before that. FWIW, Pligg (the digg clone CMS) looks like it's getting a twitter bootstrap upgrade. I've been wanting to roll my own "digg/reddit/HN" for ages. Maybe now's the time. http://www.pligg.com/demo/
FYI: Reddit is open source. You don't have to roll your own, just go git it: https://github.com/reddit/
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#30> The News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find, read and share the stories the internet is talking about. Right now. With my cynicism hat on nice and tight, it seems a bit late for that. Digg WAS, in its heyday, the best place to find and share online content. But as the management undertook on iffy decision after another, and as imitators sprung up left right and centre, it lost its pl…
I've got my reddit page nice and customized so I see exactly what I'm interested in appear on the front page every morning through specific subreddits
I come to HN for a bit more focused conversation on industry related stuff
I don't think Digg really has a place anywhere between those two