Digg v4's Problems are not Technical

Damn.

"The whole 'Cassandra to blame' thing is 100% a result of folks clinging on to the NoSQL vs SQL thing. It's a red herring.

"The new version of Digg has a whole new architecture with a bunch of technologies involved. Problem is, over the last few month or so the only technological change we mentioned (blogged about etc) was Cassandra. That made it pretty easy for folks to cling on to it as the 'problem.'

+ Digg has 500 servers in two private datacenters. Reddit has dozens on EC2.

+ Digg has ~100 employees. Reddit has a half dozen.

+ Digg took $40M. Reddit took less than $1M.

Everything we're seeing now the result of the decision to take this path. Half-hearted attempts to resurrect the dying beast are predictable, as is the drama and finger pointing.

It's very unlikely anyone could have saved Digg. Kevin just walked in a situation in which he was setup for failure. Even if he had picked the perfect strategy there's no way he would have the time and support to prove it.

I'm of mixed feelings about that bit (there was questionable code, but the launches were pretty smooth given the lack of hardware), but it's pretty obvious the person doesn't know the history of the site. But mostly that's because the PR team worked really hard to make sure people didn't.

The first 2 years were amazing. Digg is now six years old, Kevin has taken 7 digit figures "off the table," there's no question that this launch was unacceptable from so many perspectives. They just fired the wrong person.

As a former digg "power user" this is my take on the recent change and why I think is the only thing that will save digg.

I have been using digg since almost the beginning. At first I was using it for the same reason almost everyone way using digg at that time, for tech news and discussions. It might be very had to believe now, but once upon a time digg used to have very engaged group of users with thoughtful and knowledgeable comments, a lot like HN and some smaller sub-reddits on reddit. Digg was truly powered by the users with very little if any influence. It was a lot of fun and very addictive.

I think it was during v2 that they made some questionable choices by adding friends feature (I could be wrong, it could have been there before that) and "fudging" with the frontpage algo where instead of stories hitting the frontpage because of the interest on stories, they soft-limited on the number of stories-per-category could hit the frontpage. The idea was to "diversify" the site. Which in the business sense is not a bad idea, you obviously want more people to come to your site not only people who are interested in technology, but the implementation was a sham.

This had 2 negative effects:

- People who are passionate about technology and also the core majority of the digg users lost interest and left or at least started using digg less. You could really tell by the quality of the comments.

- It opened the flood gates for other non-tech sites who are now interested to get their site on digg frontpage. Getting on digg FP is profitable and also good for SEO, the amount of quality link-back you get after hitting the FP is crazy. Since the majority of the blogosphere is everyone quoting/rehashing everyone else with little original content. If you could get your original content to digg FP other related site/blog would pick it up and link back at you. Before you had to work your ass off to get high quality link back, now all you had to do was get on digg frontpage, which wasn't very difficult because of the half-assed "community" feature they added where you could friend people and they would get an RSS feed of your submission and you could blindly digg their stuff. People where literally blindly digging there stuff left and right.

The fact that this was going on alone should piss people off at Digg HQ. But they let this go on for as long as they did is, to me, mind-boggling. Either they were incompetent or they really consciously wanted the site to die.

But that's not even the worst part. But this was _very_ profitable for people who can fine tune the process of getting to the digg frontpage. ("very profitable" is subjective if you are making millions of $ a month. But if you are making thousands of $ in your spare time with very little effort I think it was profitable).

Digg users who were power users at that time (and still are) but was doing it only for fun, now saw that they can actually have fun and make money at the same time!

As it happens in most internet community (even here at HN) there are some community celebrities and people will support them no matter what. They could possibly do no harm. "babyman and co" (a la digg power-users) had such mindless followers who would support them and mindlessly digg anything they submit. And these power-users had relationships with publishers who would pay them good money to submit their stuff. You get FP you make money, if you don't get FP you still make (somewhat less) money for the "effort". But with power-users with their mindless followers, they had a very very high probability of hitting FP. So they were most sought after.

How do I know all these? Apart from being one of the top 20 digg users (until recently, in terms of FP count) I knew 12 of the 20 top digg users personally and met them often and some of the rest I spoke to regularly by phone and IM.

So how I personally profited from this?

As someone who is fairly tech savvy and half-decent writing ability. I setup 3 separate tech blogs/sites and with the co-ordination with other power users (they didn't ask for a cut-off or money if you ask them to submit your own sites) I was hitting the FP left and right. At one point I was getting 75-80% on the FP stories and during christmas holiday with high CPMs premium ads I was raking in ~8-10k a week from those 3 sites by spending less than 4 hours a day (I am also counting my time on working on the sites). I don't know about you guys, but to me, thats big money. After that, I was doing it full-time for about one year.

(Since then I sold my site, and left digg. If you must know why, and I don't have a non-cheesy answer, I felt like I was cheating, which I was, and doing something very wrong. It hit my conscious, as hard as it might be to believe. I wanted to wash myself out of this, so I sold the site and just left everything that has to do with digg.)

But systematic manipulation was not limited to power users, there were automatic bots, browsers plugins, and userscripts that could be systematically used to digg and bury submissions. How I found out about this is I was once hanging out with one of the powerusers and while waiting for our food I was checking out digg (I know I am lame), and I saw his account was digging stuff even though he was obviously not using digg himself at this very moment. So I pressed him about it and he let me in his small secret group and now almost everyone who matters does it. Sometimes around last year they did update their site and did some mass banning on users who were using bots and scripts (I was banned too but they gave me 2nd chance), but that didn't stop shit. Everyone was back to the old game after few weeks.

At this point I must point out how ironic is that people, "babyman and co" (a la power-users), who are leading the "digg revolt" this time around was the subject of all the previous "digg revolts" (except for the first one). All these time everyone was crying about getting rid of power-users, or influence of a group of people. But now that they have "fixed" it, in the sense that power-users don't have as much influence on it as they used to, people are crying about the same features that gave the power-users the ability to manipulate the site. Digg4 pretty much kills the concept of power users, yes you can still game it, as we have seen with reddit feed being on Digg frontpage, but that was according to digg a glitch in their algo, but its nothing like before.

The concept of "individual power-users" is killed or diminished. Now the publishers are the power-users, the more followers they have they more likely their site will hit the FP and they get submitted automatically, but with proper algo they can also let the regular user level out the field with user generated contents (at least that what I understand from the chatter).

Digg4, in my opinion, is the only thing that will save digg. There was NEVER people-powered-digg since v2, there was the perception of it; now it is just obvious out in open.

Sorry for the wall of text and possible spell/gramm error. I felt like I needed to say something about this. I don't use digg much anymore I usually hang out here or at reddit.

It seems like their only option was to either stagnate with an increasingly unappealing demographic, or reinvent themselves.

Instead of just writing proper SQL, they wanted to replace their entire server architecture. To me that looked like a pretty bad decision and I would halfway label that a "technical problem", although it may be more related to the technical competence of the staff than anything else.

Now ofcourse I can't remember where I saw it, or what the specific issues were and I'd love to revisit it. Anyone got a good memory or a link handy? :)