Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg • Hacker News Board

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#41

Post by alaskamiller » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:12 PM UTC

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 links that's a shade away from being as if they were spun up by a Russian spam squad. Save yourself, redo the logo, redo the color scheme, don't let legacy drag you down.

Second thing is do some soul searching, figuring out what layer Digg wants to play in. Links aggregation? Community building and content creation? Traffic? Attention? Engagement? That elusive ad sharing model for content creators?

After that figure out for who. Reddit's core is dying, and eventually it'll be fully crowded out by the mainstreaming of rage comics, aww pics, and counter-Tumblr-pseudo-nerdy programming. Do you target those people, the walking wounded much like Slashdot?

Or do you go after the youths, the ones addicted to Instagrams, 9gag, imgur, but bored of their Facebook feeds? Then play the waiting game. New is everything old, after all.

The game's so different now from 2005. All the majors have feeds now. All the majors have figured out sharing, commenting, and extracting action on a story item. On top of that you're competing against mobile guys like Flipboard.

This is one of those situations where execution is easier than creating an idea. What is Digg's $1MM idea? Good luck with that because Digg needs to be futuristic but also really lucky twice being at the right place, the right time, with the right idea. Once you're lucky, twice you're good, right?

I bet this kind of flame out, this one thing keeps Mark Zuckerberg from sleeping.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#42

Post by adpirz » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:13 PM UTC

hello_asdf wrote: post #35

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…

I liked Reddit back when it was less well known. Now, it just appears that the content appeals to the lowest common denominator. Some of the content is still great (i.e. r/dwarffortress), but a lot of the site has degraded into junk. If anyone has some good subreddits that are still decent, I'd love to know what they are.

foodforthought truereddit, economics

and if you unsubscribe from pics, funny, adviceanimals, aww, and atheism (regardless of whether you are or not, it's just not high quality content), you'll find that things suddenly get a whoooole lot better

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#43

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:14 PM UTC

uptown wrote: post #2

From WSJ: "The price was just $500,000, three people familiar with the matter said—a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230437380457752...

It "feels" like a reasonable shorthand for company outcomes is: an outcome is either (a) a categorical success for the investor, or (b) might as well be written off entirely.

With that feeling in mind, the fact that the acquisition was for $500k and not $1MM or $10MM or $40MM is irrelevant: any number falling outside bucket (a) is a loss. And you don't get into venture capital without being able to metabolize a loss.

The people that plowed money into Digg had a charter to put ~$45MM at risk. That was their job: find a place for $45MM to live and, probably, die. One major investment in 10 generates a win that pays for the other 9. So: fuck it, right?

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#44

Post by topbanana » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:15 PM UTC

hello_asdf wrote: post #35

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…

I liked Reddit back when it was less well known. Now, it just appears that the content appeals to the lowest common denominator. Some of the content is still great (i.e. r/dwarffortress), but a lot of the site has degraded into junk. If anyone has some good subreddits that are still decent, I'd love to know what they are.

http://m.quickmeme.com/meme/3pv4lu/

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#45

Post by michaelhoffman » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:15 PM UTC

speg wrote: post #12

akanster wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That WSJ article attributes Digg's fall from grace to "rivals like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc." and makes no mention of the Digg v4 redesign disaster. That was what did them in more than anything. EDIT: The story has been updated with a new paragraph, "A series of redesigns..."

It was going downhill long before v4 IMO.

Agreed, but for many (including myself), the Digg v4 fiasco was the last straw, and there was an organized exodus of users at that point.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#46

Post by Tobu » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:17 PM UTC

chimi wrote: post #31

Sorry for my ignorance. I've been searching for exactly what went wrong with the Digg redesign, but I can't find anything that really spells it out. Something with side-by-side comparisons or a deeper analysis than "Users leave in drove after Digg redesign that alienates user base." How did it alienate those users? Of course I was aware that it happened, but because I wasn't part of the community, I never understood…

"redesign" here means something more radical. Sponsored stories from partnered news outlets got auto-pushed to the front page, hand-made tweaks to the secret-sauce algorithm were used to suppress a very noticeable user protest (links to outside discussion of the redesign, and a lot of links to reddit), which turned into a revolt. All comments were lost (a very small subset was restored from somewhere, but there was no proper backup discipline). A week or so after that, someone who visited the front page would only see posts with a few hundred upvotes, and sponsored posts.

Digg was ailing before that (as I recall, the Digg Patriots and the clique dynamics were a factor), but traffic took an abrupt dive at that point.

Artistic rendering of the debacle: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/3424896427/siz... https://secure.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/4192738180/siz... https://secure.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/6642064613/siz...

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#47

Post by mcbutterbunz » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:18 PM UTC

speg wrote: post #12

akanster wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That WSJ article attributes Digg's fall from grace to "rivals like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc." and makes no mention of the Digg v4 redesign disaster. That was what did them in more than anything. EDIT: The story has been updated with a new paragraph, "A series of redesigns..."

It was going downhill long before v4 IMO.

Yes it was. Remember the digg bar?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_Bar

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#48

Post by adventureful » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:21 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #38

uptown wrote: post #2

From WSJ: "The price was just $500,000, three people familiar with the matter said—a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230437380457752...

Just to clarify - they raised 45m So either they spent 45m in past 4 years, or they did not draw down all of it or someone paid 1/2m for 10m in the bank? Or am I fundamentally missing something obvious

I'd wager they spent it. Crunchbase reports they had 60 employees at some update in the past, so it was probably higher than that at the peak. 60 employees alone probably cost them $6 to $8 million per year depending on all the perks. You could easily vaporize $25 to $35 million over four years in San Francisco on 60 employees.

But keep in mind that $45 million wasn't raised in the past four years.

On 9/08 they raised $28.7 million, and then another $5 million on 7/11. So they've raised $33.7m over the last four years.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#49

Post by adventureful » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:22 PM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #23

adventureful wrote: post #15

The only reason it's $500k and not $0 is to save a small amount of face. Digg is losing money, and has never made money in its entire history, so it's going to cost Betaworks a lot more than $500k to take it over.

Digg bleeds money because they're overstaffed for what they do. Reddit ate their lunch with five paid people, while Digg was employing dozens. I think they had over 100 people on staff at their peak. Even now, when reddit has an order of magnitude more traffic than Digg ever had (1 billion+ pageviews a month), reddit runs with a staff of about 10 people. Digg probably still has a whole lot of dead weight, even at thi…

Absolutely agree. Digg should be run by 3 to 5 people tops at its current size.

It'll still cost more than $500k to transition the service to whatever it is they have in mind. It'll probably cost more than $500k just to trim Digg down to size.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#50

Post by marknutter » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:23 PM UTC

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 making the same mistakes. Perhaps Facebook is a great place to keep in touch with friends but nothing more. Perhaps Twitter is simply a great replacement for blogging, nothing more. Instead of filling their niches and quietly making a small number of employees very wealthy, they try to become these massive institutions that are reliant on very fickle user bases. It's a house of cards.