I humbly submit that anything built in 6 weeks is going to be a disaster
Start small and iterate? If built by knowledgeable engineers, I could see it being decent. It won't be awesome at version 1.0, but what ever is?
RethinkDigg.com
61–70 of 117 posts
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#62So 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.
Again, betaworks paid 500K for domain, code (which they're throwing away), and data (and I'm not optimistic that they'll keep anything but the user accounts). What's left of the team went to WaPo, and LinkedIn bought some bullshit feature patents.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#63This 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.
This happened twice. Once at Yahoo, by engineers who really didn't want to understand product decisions, and then again at the new place, by people who didn't have access to the original product decisions.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#64>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
IMO, an even worse one is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco where MS abandoned it and the MS/IBM JDA after the SDK with a beta of it was already sent to developers. To be honest, the aforementioned JDA was not particularly good, but IBM ended up beating Chicago (Win95) by three years with OS/2 2.0, and during that gap MS used unethical tactics that was a lot worse than the JDA to attack OS/2.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#65>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/
Funny because the only "real" difference between reddit and digg is the fact that reddit has an unlimited amount of categories. That and people seem(ed) more interested in the reddit categories than the comparable digg ones.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
No worries, if they run out of time, there's always https://github.com/reddit/
Funny because the only "real" difference between reddit and digg is the fact that reddit has an unlimited amount of categories. That and people seem(ed) more interested in the reddit categories than the comparable digg ones.
The Digg algorithm was much easier to game than Reddit's.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Digg ads existed that were placed in the feed at slot 3 and 14 which were introduced in v3: http://about.digg.com/blog/ads-you-can-digg%E2%80%A6or-bury
They were ads that were pieces of content. Digg was in front of this trend with promoted tweets / stories.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny because the only "real" difference between reddit and digg is the fact that reddit has an unlimited amount of categories. That and people seem(ed) more interested in the reddit categories than the comparable digg ones.
The Digg algorithm was much easier to game than Reddit's.
I totally forgot about the big "gaming digg" scene. Damn its been a long time since I've used digg regularly.
Re: RethinkDigg.com
#69Re: RethinkDigg.com
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You could try creating a conservative-bent social news site (as suggested here in 2008: http://mattmaroon.com/2008/10/11/conservative-social-news/). As the article mentions, it can be harder to do so since the Internet as a whole leans left, but as it continues to become more mainstream someone could maybe make it work.