Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)

I wasn't a Digg founder, but I worked with them from the earliest days on Digg until its downfall.

The real story is probably way more interesting than anyone really would guess. I'll summarise it as so:

What made Digg work really was one guy who was a machine. He would vet all the stories, infiltrate all the SEO networks, and basically keep subverting them to keep the Digg front-page usable. Digg had an algorithm, but it was basically just a simple algorithm that helped this one dude 10x his productivity and keep the quality up.

Google came to buy Digg, but figured out that really it's just a dude who works 22 hours a day that keeps the quality up, and all that talk of an algorithm was smoke and mirrors to trick the SEO guys into thinking it was something they could game (they could not, which is why front page was so high quality for so many years). Google walked.

Then the founders realised if they ever wanted to get any serious money out of this thing, they had to fix that. So they developed "real algorithms" that independently attempted to do what this one dude was doing, to surface good/interesting content.

They thought they'd succeeded, or market pressures forced their hand, whatever. So they rolled it along with a catastrophic UI/UX and back-end tech rewrite all rolled up into one.

It was a total shit-show. I was involved in the "old" MySQL stack, and watched them totally fuck it up with beta software that wasn't ready for production (Cassandra, at the time, was not what it is today).

The algorithm to figure out what's cool and what isn't wasn't as good as the dude who worked 22 hours a day, and without his very heavy input, it just basically rehashed all the shit that was popular somewhere else a few days earlier.

So you ended up with a site that was ugly, fuxed, no-one in the existing wanted, and with a bland boring bunch of stories on the front-page, which was not at all compelling for anyone new showing up to check stuff out.

Instead of taking this massive slap to the face constructively, the founders doubled-down. And now here we are.

To be clear, much of the tech behind Digg was very interesting, the work Owen and many other engineers did was very interesting. The algorithm was all smoke and mirrors, though. And Kevin and his little circle of buddies were all crap engineers that tanked the business with their hubris and inexperience.

I was an avid user of Digg. I remember having to force myself not to spend too much time on the site. I enjoyed the content. Always interesting stuff was posted. I also enjoyed the funny comments. I remember the epic downvotes. The Dumbledore comments. The Photoshop comments. The DVD key comments. Lots of fun.

My memory of what happened was this. There was some infighting about the comment threads and how they should be implemented. A new approach got implemented. The site started crawling any time you clicked on a comment. Everyone was saying that of course it wasn’t going to work and a particular person’s approach shouldn’t have been used. The site became unusable. After that it became a blur, because I must have stopped using the site. I believe the downfall of Digg occurred around these changes.

I would be curious of other people’s timeline.

Edit: this comment is descriptive, not prescriptive

If you have ever moderated a subreddit you'd understand why mods wind up with heavy handed approaches.

Even moderately sized subreddits are a lot of work, especially of a post gets to the front page. You can't have gourmet experiences at fast-food scale. When you have a long list of reports to go through, and you have been moderating long-enough, your decisions are based on heuristics rather than nuanced explanation or checking the post history of some (non-subscribed guest) snowflake Redditor who think their spicy take is insightful and/or you're taking away their 1A rights when they haven't bothered to read the rules of the subreddit they are commenting in. Subreddits are not a townsquare open to all-comers, they are very large clubhouses with distinct rules and norms - mods exist to enforce those rules.

There's no time for - nor an upside to splitting hairs on whether a commenter is a transphobic nazi[1] or merely matches the archetype. When modding, false positives are vastly preferable to false negatives since mods value their time more than the individual commenters who get caught up, and I don't see this changing even if you were to become the mod

1. Or is a "woke brigader" on the conservative subreddits.

Lemmy?

(and that one dude was Owen?)