RethinkDigg.com
51–60 of 117 posts
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#52>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
Presumably they're not rebuilding the same product!
So I doubt that applies at all.
And a Digg-type site is not that hard to build. It's light-years away from the complexity of a web browser, for instance.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wo…
Look at history: The Digg v4 rewrite was catastrophic. Not in that it didn't work (it was quite elegant engineering wise e.g. Cassandra-powered Digg buttons) but in that it took a really long time and when it was finally ready it was already behind.
Actually, when it was first released, it simply didn't work. Very few pages actually loaded, and there were errors all over the place.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#54Earlier 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…
If you don't mind me asking, how good a job do you think John N. did? Did the buck stop with him on this engineering project?
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#55>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
Presumably they're not rebuilding the same product! So I doubt that applies at all. And a Digg-type site is not that hard to build. It's light-years away from the complexity of a web browser, for instance.
Easy to build, hard to scale (although far easier than when Digg was first built). Also getting the voting algorithm right, assuming they're going to continue with that model, takes a lot of refinement.
But yeah, overall I agree. Why would they rebuild the same product? That's already failed.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#56Please lose the Facebook/Twitter popup. Get rid of a lot of that ad space and social media buttons. "News" should not be a major focus. Programming, gaming, science, and the arts would be a good start.
Stop quoting Silicon Valley insiders and relegate them to a corner of the site if you must place any emphasis on "tech". They did a lot to ruin Digg with the endless self-promotion. Acknowledge Reddit like they never did and take inspiration from subreddits, but make them easier to discover. Reddit has yet to do this and it is a noticeable deficiency on their part.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#57This reminds me of del.icio.us and the new team, that rewrote it from scratch. It is very similar - old product that shone in the past but was out of focus in recent years.
The rewrite didn't work right; old users were angry and new users didn't appear.
But maybe this will be better, who knows.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#58http://RethinkRethinkDigg.com
Redirects to Reddit.com... clever. In my opinion, Reddit is kind of fun in small doses, but the groupthink and mob mentality over there is unbearable.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#59Their question about "how do you get your news" is very significantly missing Reddit or Hacker News as an answer.
wow, good call. late night oversight. edited the survey.
I wouldn't lump HN, Reddit and "Other" together since Reddit is widely read with impressive traffic. It is a significant news site.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#60Rebuilding? 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?
We have no idea what the code looks like. Maybe some knowledgeable engineers took a look at it and figured it would be better in the long run to just design and build something new themselves, instead of inheriting someone else's hairy, warty code. (I am just offering ideas here, I don't actually know how hairy the code is or how many warts it has.)