Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

blog.betaworks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 137 posts

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#111

Post by derleth »

alaskamiller wrote: post #41

Reddit won the game, slow and steady. Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse. BuzzFeed? HuffPo? Gawker? TheDaily? Reddit, yesterday. First thing first is rescue the culture. Digg engineering already fled, the peanut gallery in the valley keeps squawking with delight about your failure, and all you have left is some nicely designed pages showing double digit gains on stale lin…

> Reddit's core

What core? /r/reddit died a long time ago; not 'died' as in "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" but died as in no longer exists.

It's all subreddits now. You can have your own list of subreddits, none of them 'dying' or 'uncool', all of them interesting to you.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#112

Post by nikcub »

jgroome wrote: post #13

> 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…

the cost of switching with content aggregators is so low, and there is a network effect in the switch, so I would never write digg off. just thinking about it, I would probably give whatever they build next a chance

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#113

Post by codexon »

marknutter wrote: post #50

This is a case of a company having delusions of grandeur. Instead of humming along with 10 or so employees raking in cash hand-over fist, they tried to grow as fast and as large as possible to try to revolutionize news. Instead, Reddit did the former and is stable and profitable; it never pretends to be something it's not. Not all companies are going to change the world, nor should they. I see Facebook and Twitter ma…

As someone who used Digg and Reddit from their infancy I have been able to observe when and how Digg fell from #1. I don't think they failed because they were having delusions of grandeur.

The 1st mistake that Digg made was the introduction of power users. As a power user your stories were artificially boosted to the front page. After this happened, I noticed a huge decline in quality where the front page became mostly populated by articles from cracked and huffingtonpost. This quote from another user summed up the situation.

In version 3 around 100 diggers ran 80% of the front page – to get on the front page you had to cover Kevin getting a blow job from Stallman, or get a power user to submit your story. At that point Digg was not a democracy at all, but a curated list by paid Digg pros who shilled for hire. If you were a nice guy, or a tech publisher, you had power digger friends who would submit your stuff for you for free.

Then there is the 2nd mistake that everyone knows about. Digg 4.0, the last mistake that finally made Reddit bigger than Digg. Large domains Engadget and Mashable flooded the front page with their auto-submitted stories. It was then that Kevin Rose betrayed the power users for large publishers, just as he had betrayed the regular users for power users many years ago.

If Digg had not done any of this, there would have been a very good chance that they would still have been the largest aggregator today.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#114

Post by brc »

dreadsword wrote: post #32

$500k: hard to tell if they've over- or under- paid. What's the Digg Balance Sheet look like? How about the last year of cash flow statements? Without those, its impossible to evaluate the worthiness of the deal.

Note it's 'acquiring the assets' rather than 'acquiring the company'.

In general this means the steaming wreck of a company will be left behind, asset stripped. In other words, if Digg owes you money, you're not going to be able to ask the new owners for it.

It also means it's up to them which employees (if any) they take on.

This is a sale of brand name, domain name, IP and probably very little else.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#115

Post by Hovertruck »

SquareWheel wrote: post #93
lukifer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google "definition literally". It's depressing, but that's the way the cookie bounces: language mutates, for better and for worse.

"Used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling." Well that just makes me sad. We don't really have another word to use in its stead, do we?

You could say "for all intents and purposes" or "practically".

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#116

Post by corford »

awj wrote: post #98
corford wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use reddit so have a fairly basic understanding of how it works but looking at all these replies about subreddits, it struck me that basically reddit is a web2.0 version of usenet. So I guess that means good content is there, you just need to know where to look :) P.S. for the redditors: I have nothing against reddit, it's just that I'm already drowning in information and never found the time to get in to it.

That's actually a pretty decent analogy. Obviously the focus on posting links and ranking and such is different, but the user experience of someone totally new is similar. As is the searching for tiny pockets of awesome in a sea of idiocy.

Heh heh I love your phrase "searching for tiny pockets of awesome in a sea of idiocy" - that pretty much sums up my entire relationship with the internet :D

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#117

Post by vaksel »

unreal37 wrote: post #55
runn1ng wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The domain name and brand recognition. For $500K, cheap.

yeah, something shady must be going on.

My guess is that you'll find similar people on Digg's and News.me boards. And this was just a way to a) write off Digg as a permanent loss off the books and b) transfer those assets cheaply to the other company, which might boost them from being a loser to being a winner

Noone sells Digg for $500K...not unless they are millions and millions in debt

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#118

Post by drivebyacct2 »

citricsquid wrote: post #69
blhack wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. Go to the front page of reddit right now and try to find me a piece of news. I see 2 items out of 25 links. One of them is a [linkbait title] story about wikileaks winning a case against VISA (in iceland). The other is about a Canadian supreme court ruling.

The replies you'll get are "you make your own reddit, just remove the popular subreddits!" but you're right. reddit is usable for hardcore users that want to invest real time into their experience, it's atrocious for casual users (that don't care for the meme spam). There is a large hole that (new) Digg could fill.

This is obnoxiously false.

If no one liked reddit, no one would be there. The majority of current users came from digg. You can watch the decline in content and maturity since then (and before then as digg was shedding users before they flipped the switch on diggv4). The content APPEALS to them which is why reddit keeps gaining users.

The "real" or "hardcore" users, aka the ones that have been there since when the content was good and relevant, are smart enough to find subreddits that appeal to them because they like the style and functionality of reddit.

I will agree that digg could go back to its tech roots and gain back some of that crowd. I myself have found tech related news on digg that was not posted to reddit, at all.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#119

Post by drivebyacct2 »

blhack wrote: post #65
alaskamiller wrote: post #41

Reddit won the game, slow and steady. Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse. BuzzFeed? HuffPo? Gawker? TheDaily? Reddit, yesterday. First thing first is rescue the culture. Digg engineering already fled, the peanut gallery in the valley keeps squawking with delight about your failure, and all you have left is some nicely designed pages showing double digit gains on stale lin…

No it doesn't. Go to the front page of reddit right now and try to find me a piece of news. I see 2 items out of 25 links. One of them is a [linkbait title] story about wikileaks winning a case against VISA (in iceland). The other is about a Canadian supreme court ruling.

That doesn't seem like his point. I think he is pointing out that digg changed too much and changed too much of the UX and people got fed up and moved to the next best thing.

I don't think he's saying Zuckerberg is worried about reddit, he's saying Zuckerberg is worried about being a fad or a blip. And he should be. More than one metric is indicating that Facebook usage per-user is diminishing, or at least peaking.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#120

Post by drivebyacct2 »

justincormack wrote: post #80
alaskamiller wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating two things. Reddit doesn't often break news, Twitter does that more in real time with its immediacy and reach. Just like Hacker News is/was to TechCrunch, Reddit generates a news cycle, as in right now across the world there are cadres of journalists and bloggers using Reddit to source and/or get ideas on what to write and feed into the long tail.

No thats not the case. Reddit is not that important. But Digg is dead.

It kills me to see the reddit-hate here cloud obvious facts. There are a number of things that reddit has gotten good worldwide publicity for or has had a hand in shaping. That's not true for a large number of sites. In terms of what reddit is, it is important.
Post reply on HN