Just a little time capsule of then and now.
Letter from Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian to Digg Founder Kevin Rose, from Internet Archive of http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose
Kevin,
It’s been a while since you cleverly debuted digg on ScreenSavers on that “Slashdot Killers” segment.
Funded by Y Combinator, Steve Huffman and I started work on reddit in June 2005, which we launched a month later. A month after that, we learned about digg and realized this was going to be an interesting new space – we had some catching up to do.
Remember those great days? It was long before Facebook was confusing people with awkward privacy settings, before Twitter existed, and even pre-dating the “social media” industry – back when “social media gurus” were simply called “tools.”
You built a remarkably popular website with an adoring fanbase most companies can only dream of. Diggnation was a brilliant decision and paved the way for Revision3, which doesn’t get half of the press it deserves. In short: you were in the zone.
And we got lucky, frankly. We sold to Condé Nast in 2006, which stayed hands off, let the site keep growing, and even encouraged us to open source – the site has grown to over 1/2 million unique visitors a day. And all of that is run by only 4 awesomesauce developers (edit: and one fantastic community manager!); I think the math comes out to 1 dev for every 2 million monthly uniques.
You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round.
I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”
Those are your words from that aforementioned 2004 video segment.
Now what matters is how many followers & influence a user has and how many followers & influence they’ve got.
Where have we heard this before: Twitter? Facebook? GoogleBuzz?
Kevin, you absolutely deserve all the credit for starting the movement – fascinating things happen when online communities can efficiently share content. Whales get silly names and we can expose the tragedies our fellow man endures faster than ever before.
It’s a damned shame to see digg just re-implementing features from other websites.
But I’ve got a strong feeling it’s not you making these decisions anymore; and to see your baby abused like this must be awful.
This really should’ve been called “an open letter to digg’s VCs” (but what kind of linkbait would that be?) because they really ought to give the power back to the founder.
All the best,
AlexisThis is fascinating. Thanks for sharing!
Here’s another contemporaneous article with a good amount of info: https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450
Personally I like this summary from a Harvard student assignment:
In August 2010, Digg attempted to wrest control back from its power users by migrating to a new system (Digg v4) that deemphasized user-contributed content in favor of publisher-contributed content. The change incited an uproar among power users and regular visitors alike, who felt the company was selling out to the mainstream media it had originally sought to replace. Digg experienced a mass exodus of users, many of whom turned to rival site Reddit. While Digg’s traffic fell by a quarter in the following month, Reddit’s traffic grew by 230% in 2010. Digg never recovered from its transition to Digg v4, and the site continued to bleed users and traffic over the next two years. By July 2012, the time of its sale to Betaworks, Digg’s monthly unique visitor count had fallen 90% from its peak.
Thank you! I appreciate this conversation and upvoted OP, but I have no desire to click a link that goes back to Reddit, lol.
Man… I went from slashdot, to digg, to reddit…
I still have my slashdot account though, slashdot is a shadow of what it used to be. Pretty sure my digg account is long dead. We’ll see with reddit I guess.
Yup, first time being aware of the Snoo Platform was after reading a Slashdot thread of (unfortunately) Aaron Swartz’s suicide.
Still have a Slashdot account, but not used for a long time after Vulcan moved to the Snoo Platform.
Duck me, is this the new Rick Roll? Clicked on the link and unexpectedly landed on Reddit. How about a trigger warning, lol.
The cycle is repeating again…
Thanks for posting
It is interesting how, no matter how much technology changes, human nature doesn’t and history repeats itself
I think that’s why “enshittification” is so aggravating to me. We’ve seen time and time again that users revolt from sites that are cluttered, busy, and stuffed with ads in favor of things that are clean and text based (Digg 4 to Reddit, Myspace to Facebook) but somehow the same people proud of themselves for their clean interfaces end up trying to convince everyone that “actually spam is fine.” Die a hero or live a villain, etc., but I can’t for a moment believe anyone is proud of themselves when stuffing every square inch of a website with bullshit and trying to extract every penny. They know shit looks like shit because they, too, don’t like sites that look like this.
