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

lethain.com

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

#51

Post by unsupp0rted »

deergomoo wrote: post #18

Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues. I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.

This is why I’m excited for the Reddit third party apps change.

In a few years nobody will remember that this is what precipitated the fall of Reddit. It’s already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.

Even the smaller subs catch the contagion year over year.

I’ve been a Redditor since before the narwhal baconed at midnight. I miss the Reddit that was good.

I’m excited to see what replaces it.

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

#52

Post by throw_m239339 »

nunobrito wrote: post #16

Albeit unpopular opinion, this kind of things is one of the reasons why I'll always push for Java instead of a jigsaw of different languages that sound cool. Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly. Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple. Too…

Digg didn't fail because it didn't use Java, that's preposterous. Java isn't more scalable, stable or simple than any other solution, that's Java consultancy bullshit.

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

#53

Post by cyanydeez »

captainmuon wrote: post #30
tyingq wrote: post #29

A year or two prior to this, they were also putting linked sites into iframes, with the "digg bar" on top. So they had managed to alienate not just their users, but also the site owners that all the content linked to.

That can actually be quite useful, if implemented correctly. Even as a site owner I wouldn't mind, because it lets users upvote my content after reading it easily. But evolving browser standards killed it and most of the time it was implemented annoyingly. Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little incons…

If reddit and Twitter kill their API, there's probably space for a noutofband plugin that creates arbitrary forums on content. Like, you find a website with an image, you hash the image and that creates your standard forum and voting system. Then wheverver that hash shows up, so does the forum.

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

#54

Post by nunobrito »

biorach wrote: post #26
nunobrito wrote: post #16

Albeit unpopular opinion, this kind of things is one of the reasons why I'll always push for Java instead of a jigsaw of different languages that sound cool. Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly. Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple. Too…

It's pretty clear from the article that the issues Digg had were not caused by choice of language.

They literally complain about python bad choices of libraries.

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

#55

Post by marban »

cainxinth wrote: post #48

I still read Digg, along with HN, Reddit, slashdot, metafilter, lobste.rs, kottke, boing boing and many other sources of news and links. I’ve always been an information junkie. High brow, low brow, I don’t care. I want it all.

See https://upstract.com

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

#56

Post by [deleted] »

captainmuon wrote: post #30
tyingq wrote: post #29

A year or two prior to this, they were also putting linked sites into iframes, with the "digg bar" on top. So they had managed to alienate not just their users, but also the site owners that all the content linked to.

That can actually be quite useful, if implemented correctly. Even as a site owner I wouldn't mind, because it lets users upvote my content after reading it easily. But evolving browser standards killed it and most of the time it was implemented annoyingly. Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little incons…

[deleted]

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

#57

Post by faefox »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #19
biorach wrote: post #3

> Our API server was a Python Tornado service... and one of the most frequently accessed endpoint was used to retrieve user by their name or id. Because it supported retrieval by either name or id, it set default values for both parameters as empty lists. This is a super reasonable thing to do! However, Python only initializes default parameters when the function is first evaluated, which means that the same list is…

Forget about production, how did this make it into python? This is so unbelievably stupid it makes PHP look like a sensible language.

This is the question people should be asking rather than trying to identify which Digg employee should be retroactively thrown under the bus. Just a completely insane design decision.

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

#58

Post by tyingq »

captainmuon wrote: post #30
tyingq wrote: post #29

A year or two prior to this, they were also putting linked sites into iframes, with the "digg bar" on top. So they had managed to alienate not just their users, but also the site owners that all the content linked to.

That can actually be quite useful, if implemented correctly. Even as a site owner I wouldn't mind, because it lets users upvote my content after reading it easily. But evolving browser standards killed it and most of the time it was implemented annoyingly. Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little incons…

Site owners just aren't going to be excited about stealing the most important bit of real estate and putting buttons there that navigate away from your site, that the end user presumably chose to navigate to. And other problems, like breaking bookmarking, no SEO benefits from the "link", etc.

The selfishness of it is obvious if you think through what would happen if someone posted one of these dig iframed urls to another digg-like site, which was then itself posted to a third digg-like site. 3 stacked headers, yay!

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

#59

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

nunobrito wrote: post #50
swalsh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit, the clear winner of Diggs traffic was written in python. Guess Python might work just fine :\

Indeed. Or maybe it was the winner of Diggs traffic despite being written in Lisp at that time..

Reddit had already been rewritten in Python long before Digg's collapse. Several years. There may have still been ancillary services in Lisp, but nothing production-critical.

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

#60

Post by mr90210 »

neom wrote: post #9

Kevin Rose: We migrated from LAMP to Cassandra because LAMP doesn't scale and Cassandra does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQNBcIPSROs

By the way, thanks for sharing the video. It took me back to a simpler era, two guys drinking and talking about the issues they had to overcome. We now take these social media for granted, but back then some of those problems were too knew for those guys.
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