Not Even Kevin Rose Really Uses Digg Anymore | Hacker News Reader

Not Even Kevin Rose Really Uses Digg Anymore

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58 pointsssclafani42 comments

Wait, it's not even true that he's only done 7 actions in the last month. His diggs just aren't sorted exactly chronologically

http://digg.com/kevinrose/diggs

There are 7 diggs in the past 17 days, then one from 2/8, then at least 6 more that are within the last 30 days.

And comparing to Twitter actions is dumb. The real(ish) story would be if there's been a precipitous drop in his Digging. Maybe it's been a long time since he Digged a lot because he's gotten so busy. Or maybe he's never Digged all that much and he's more of a lurker.

I'll leave figuring out if there has been a precipitous drop as an exercise for someone who cares about Digg.

What is with that bar graph? Who thought 'I'm sure our readers can't comprehend the difference between '181' and '7', so we'd better put it on a graph'?

A little thing we like to call 'visual impact'.

Frankly I'm just amazed whenever I see a graph online where somebody hasn't diddled the y axis, or a 3d pie graph with massive chin that 'accidentally' makes the lower slices look much more massive than the top slices.

Ah yes, not even the Steve himself can resist the ole pie chart chin trick.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/jan/21/liesda...

Maybe he'd blame that on the default styling of pie charts in Keynote (tsk!), but it'd take some extraordinary reality distortion to believe the Apple slice landed at the bottom by accident.

it's actually not a bad strategy for the 'tl;dr' cravers - a graphic near the bottom that expresses the main point of the piece

What's so surprising about this? He's a busy man.

When was the last time Chad Hurley used his YouTube account to do something? How often do you think Zuck is on Facebook?

This is truly absurd. I don't often try to rain down insults at TechCrunch, but this is over the edge.

Everything from the SEO-ified headline, to the factually incorrect content, to the intellectually insulting bar graph, to finally the fact that there really isn't even a story here even if the claims might be true...is just annoying. This is over the edge.

The key point in the article is that he's not so busy that he doesn't use Twitter all the time. I think your point would be more valid if Hurley or Zuckerberg were using another service 10 to 1 over their own.

Respectfully disagree.

Twitter's more akin to Email. Much more of a staple product.

It's like comparing how often Hurley emails/texts with how often he likes things and uploads videos onto YouTube.

Fair enough.

I vaguely remember pownce, wasn't it twitter with filesharing?

> How often do you think Zuck is on Facebook?

Honestly? I get the impression he at least looks at it (is that enough to be "on" it?) daily.

Zuck uses facebook every day (not only with his account but with Beast's also!)

I absolutely agree. However, to be honest, I didn't realize it until I read your comment. Maybe it's because I am still working on my morning coffee, but I read the TC post, thought "bummer for Digg", and moved on.

This is what makes a site like HN so great. Crowd-sourcing news analysis provides for such a better experience. I'm still working on my coffee, but I think HN is pointing towards the future of news.

Agreed but companies should always try and use their own products. If you manage Mercedes, it is eensible not to drive a BMW.

Article is theater though.

This is so pointless and stupid. Maybe he's caught up in actually developing the site? Or using a staging server with bleeding-edge features that aren't reflecting his production account?

The point of the article isn't that he isn't engaging online; it is that he is doing it on another platform (Twitter).

And Digg andTwitter are both brilliant platforms for totally different forms of engagement. If Zuckerberg (@finkd) were to get more active on Flickr or Twitter would one say that Facebook is not a great service anymore?

Right. How active do you think he is with his email client? Does that mean he's not working?

I give them credit for trying to reinvent themselves but it seems it was just too late. People use twitter to share links now.

Reddit has stayed relevant due to its focus on community.

According to wikipedia 96% of tweets are not news

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Tweet_contents

I don't use twitter for news because I don't care to sift through the 96% of drivel people seem to put up there. But your saying people actually do that?

How do people find good context on twitter? Do they follow people who only post good news type stuff along with their boring friends?

When you want news, go to the profile of a news organization, not a high school buddy. If you want a stream of tweets, put a couple news organizations into a list and read the list. http://twitter.com/#!/reutersflash http://twitter.com/#!/skynewsbreak

Digg used to be my homepage until I got totally irrelevant to me. I tried reddit for a while and got hooked by the quality of the content about programming and python. The funny and pics sections are cool too.

Kevin's response via Twitter: http://twitter.com/kevinrose/status/48593910083239936

A poor refutation given that diggnation is released on a weekly basis but is recorded once a month.

They only record once a month?

Pretty sure that's incorrect.

I can't readily substantiate it because video and audio aren't Google-able but it has been referenced on the show in passing, Alex has mentioned it in an interview on how he schedules TRS, diggnation, etc and I believe Kevin himself mentioned it once when asked about his own schedule at one point. The best I can do is to point you toward Alex's once a month trips to SF:

http://twitter.com/alexalbrecht/status/32545131399741441 http://twitter.com/alexalbrecht/status/42823598360109056

I admit to not actually being sure, but I bet Kevin flies the other way every month, so they actually shoot every 2 weeks.

They build you up and tear you down.

More like "they build you up, and you tear you down".

The demise of Digg is entirely self-inflicted.

My recollection is that amongst other things they:

Had a big pointless UI change

Arbitrary changes to how something shows up on the front page

Polluted the frontpage with 'sponsored links' (read as: advertising)

Layered ads on their ads ("I heard you like ads...") with a side-helping of ads.

In order to increase click-through they were trying to make the ads look like normal links... this is scammy. Once you start lying to your users, why should they trust you? Once you lose their trust, how will you ever get it back?

-----

Now I'm not saying advertising is evil, and I'm not saying they shouldn't try to monetize. Gotta put food on the table somehow.

But honestly, I don't believe that they've dropped from 18 million to 12 million. 18 million to 1.8 million, that I'd believe. Digg is like a ghost-town now compared to what it used to be.

You forgot the diggbar

Well, I had successfully forgotten the diggbar until you reminded me. :D

To do: add "bleach for the brain" to shopping list.

Honestly I never used it. Presumably there were those who loved it, those who hated it, and those who went 'meh'. I remember it generating a lot of controversy, I just don't remember what it was that it was supposed to do.

digg's own #dickbar

worked out well for them

This wasn't good either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy...

Actually, as I recall, that was pretty good for traffic.

I was big into digg for a long time, then I discovered Reddit, which happens to be the exact opposite of every point that you made.

Digg had some cool UI elements and a cool labs subdomain, and as a web dev, that kept me interested. The content and the system as a whole made me move away from it.

That's pretty sad. The worst part is they just mentioned that they sped up the homepage by 75%, which is really irrelevant for a site that isn't technically focused like Google. They're trying to appeal to the wrong crowd.

Your comment seems to imply that they sped up the time it takes to load the homepage by 75%, which is not the case. That figure was a in reference to how frequently a new story hits the homepage.

Well it is the case, just not what's being trumpeted in the latest press release. v4 was supposed to speed up page load significantly, that's why they added the little page load timer at the bottom of the page.

I think there may be a bit of confusion here, as the recent post about the increased number of daily stories on Digg's frontpage was written by a Digg user and posted to their blog, not written by Digg staff or otherwise endorsed by us. (I work at Digg.) Our last blog post was yesterday ( http://about.digg.com/blog/how-get-started-digg-filtering-my... ) and about a couple of new features we rolled out.

"For a site that isn't technically focused like Google"

A 400ms improvement in page load time at Yahoo directly increased page views by 12%

Although Digg isn't actually speeding up their page serving, you should note that page speed is one of the cornerstones of conversion rate optimization.

Google will even penalize slower sites in SEO rankings. Page speed is about the easiest way to improve engagement and conversion rate with modern CDNs etc:

http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2010/07/01/the-best-graph...

http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/official-google-new...

Completely off-topic, but I just noticed that when people reply to your comments on TechCrunch it notifies you on Facebook. That is baller.

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