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RethinkDigg.com

rethinkdigg.com

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Re: RethinkDigg.com

#31

Post by blhack »

Zarathust wrote: post #5

Am I the only one without a smartphone? I'm still using some old, beaten up Samsung crap which allows me to talk and sms a little. I spend my whole life in front of a computer, I am still always connected. Clearly, they are taking the "mobile" approach, it just doesn't suit me very well

It's not just your phone. I have an iPhone and an iPad (well...and another convertable netbook "tablet" thing that has been sitting in a project box for over a year), and I don't really "do" mobile.

Mobile news? Are people that attention deficient?

Re: RethinkDigg.com

#33

Post by trustfundbaby »

I wonder if the name isn't tarnished enough to hold, whatever comes out next, back from being truly great?

It just seems there's enough baggage for people to dismiss the new digg offhand if it isn't named something else. What do you guys think?

Re: RethinkDigg.com

#34

Post by stevoski »

Rebuilding? Why not take the working code and refine, refine, refine, continuously, so that each week or two the site is subtly better, less buggy, more usable?

Re: RethinkDigg.com

#35

Post by slig »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #30
mcantelon wrote: post #19

>What they didn’t mention is that we’re rebuilding it from scratch. In six weeks. Famous last words. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

No worries, if they run out of time, there's always https://github.com/reddit/

I remember that reddit was very hard to set up. Is it any easier nowadays?

Re: RethinkDigg.com

#36

Post by rocky1138 »

Zarathust wrote: post #5

Am I the only one without a smartphone? I'm still using some old, beaten up Samsung crap which allows me to talk and sms a little. I spend my whole life in front of a computer, I am still always connected. Clearly, they are taking the "mobile" approach, it just doesn't suit me very well

I'm the same. I have a motorolla razr from 2006 on an $11/month pay as you go. I've always got my laptop with me.

Re: RethinkDigg.com

#37

Post by pteromyscus »

mcantelon wrote: post #19

>What they didn’t mention is that we’re rebuilding it from scratch. In six weeks. Famous last words. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

One measly article does not a law constitute.

There ARE counter-examples of successful systems re-built from scratch.

The rewrite might have killed Netscape, for example, but without the rewrite from scratch not only would have Netscape died but there wouldn't be a Firefox or Mozilla Foundation now.

(And I'd argue that it wasn't the rewrite that killed Netscape: the rewrite was necessary. What killed Netscape, and would have killed it even without the rewrite, was that the then all-mighty Microsoft decided to get into the internet game for real and build a good-enough browser. It's ironic that this good enough browser was IE6, which we know view as the worst impediment to web progress).

Also, didn't Frederic Brooks say "prepare to throw one away"?

Re: RethinkDigg.com

#38

Post by yoasif_ »

soup10 wrote: post #26
uptown wrote: post #11

So what'd they buy? No team. Scrapped the old code. 500k for the name, and the ability to get a percentage of their old users to at least take a look when they launch?

Yep, (they paid a lot more than that) and it's probably worth it imo. Half the battle with web 2.0 sites is getting enough users to get the ball rolling. Digg already has that, and all they have to do is "reinvent" themselves with a great design and a focus on some set of users that aren't being well served by other community websites. Personally I'd try to target groups that reddit alienates.

> Personally I'd try to target groups that reddit alienates.

Who are these groups? I'm (re)starting development of my own social news site, and I'm looking for a userbase to cater to.

Re: RethinkDigg.com

#39

Post by pteromyscus »

smacktoward wrote: post #9
blu3jack wrote: post #2

Ironically, it was "rethinking digg" and "rebuilding it from scratch" that killed it in the first place.

Yeah, that was my first thought too. The second thought was that ground-up rewrites are almost never a good idea to begin with. You end up throwing out whatever's good about the old property along with all the bad, and risk turning off the members of whatever user base you have left (who presumably stuck around because they saw something they liked in the old version). I suppose the population of Digg users is probab…

>The second thought was that ground-up rewrites are almost never a good idea to begin with.

For a complex system, like an OS or a browser.

This is a bloody social news site, as trivial an application as it gets.

One man can write a half-decent one in a week.

And for ramping it up, even the scaling roadblocks and tricks are old news by now to the web building community in general.

Re: RethinkDigg.com

#40

Post by laberge »

SupermanScott wrote: post #24
laberge wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really though, everyone knew that V4 was a terrible idea and they simply went forward without caring much for the community. I mean what kind of marketing research could you do to prove that using promoted stories is a good way to build a community?

"Promoted Stories" myth needs to end. It wasn't the case, there was a severe bug whereby a Regular Expression only matched RSS content. The Regular Expression acted as a gateway into the Popular Algorithm. I worked at Digg and I fixed that bug. It wasn't noticed before launch because we echoed the v3 popular stories into the beta version of v4. Digg was never paid for stories hitting the frontpage. And for all the fl…

Well the fact rests, the community generally believed that there was a ton of promoted stories because, you guys never told anyone otherwise or did a poor job communicating.

And im certain promoted stories did exist, I remember them clearly marked as that.

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