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Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

blog.betaworks.com

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Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#51

Post by zem »

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.

there are a lot of excellent small subreddit, but their appeal will obviously depend on whether you share that subinterest. some good larger ones are /r/askscience, /r/printsf and /r/coding.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#52

Post by shortlived »

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.

It's all about the subreddits

http://subreddits.org/

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#54

Post by mkr-hn »

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://www.reddit.com/reddits/

Reddit is what you make it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#55

Post by unreal37 »

runn1ng wrote: post #20
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...

"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.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#57

Post by RegEx »

topbanana wrote: post #44
hello_asdf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

This might be the first permissible use of quickmeme on HN ;)

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#58

Post by RegEx »

zem wrote: post #51
hello_asdf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there are a lot of excellent small subreddit, but their appeal will obviously depend on whether you share that subinterest. some good larger ones are /r/askscience, /r/printsf and /r/coding.

/r/learnprogramming is a great place to learn and contribute

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#59

Post by gamble »

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…

The Digg redesign had any number of problems, most of them inherent in any project to completely reimplement a complex piece of software that already has a large user base. Bugs, missing features, etc.

IMO, the larger problem was one of philosophy. Was the site primarily designed for people generating the traffic or those receiving it? How do you deal with people gaming the system? Digg chose to side with the people gaming the system, presumably because it was a more obvious path to profitability. (Digg had a large staff and ridiculously high burn rate) Prior to the v4 redesign, however, there was at least the illusion that regular users' submissions and voting mattered. Digg v4 simply eliminated the roundabout of gaming the system by making votes almost irrelevant; publishers and marketeers could simply pipe all of their content directly to the top of the frontpage by gathering a sufficiently large number of followers. It made the site little more than a pseudo-RSS frontend for content farms.

Reddit has been successful by fighting a vigorous, if behind-the-scenes, war against spamming and gaming. It may be regressing toward the mean, but at least it's a mean defined by the users rather than a spammer.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#60

Post by starpilot »

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.

/r/securityanalysis is excellent for those interested in analyzing financial securities. It's pretty narrow, but just shows that pockets of deep content do exist on a mostly frivolous site.
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