Rob Malda recently moved to the WaPo where <i>he will be the Chief Strategist and Editor-at-Large working for WaPo Labs.</i><p><a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/03/05/202206/rob-malda-cmdrtaco-joins-the-washington-post" rel="nofollow">http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/03/05/202206/rob-malda-cmd...</a><p>So this potentially places the founder of Slashdot heading the Digg Team at the Washington Post.<p>Make of that what you will. (I'll note it is 2012, and there could be another MySpace acquisition in the works.)
Digg is one of those websites i used to use on a daily basis, it was my main source of news every day, now i forget it even exists until a story like this pops up.<p>The one thing that this teaches me is that if you have a web property with a decently sized user base, if you want to change things, do it incrementally and get feedback from users as you do it, rather than carpet bomb them with design and feature changes.
I just browsed the "Trending" category on Digg for all topics. Most stories have single digit comments. Ouch. Amazing how far the site has fallen since its glory days.
The irony that this hit the front page of Hacker News before the front page of Digg isn't lost on me. As a Digg member since May 11th, 2006 my heart is broken...
Still <i>very</i> respectable traffic on digg (as compared to reddit and HN): <a href="http://imgur.com/a/BMHXe" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/a/BMHXe</a><p>I'd be surprised if the WaPo (or someone else) doesn't step up to take it over.
Will there be a Business Week cover story about Kevin Rose with the title "How this kid lost $60 million in three years"?<p><a href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_33/b3997002.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_33/b3997002....</a><p>Nah, that title probably won't sell too many magazines.<p>(This is a rip on BW's inflammatory, "let's ignore facts" writing style, not Rose.)
Reddit's site is ugly and the UI is horrible. I've tried to use it and it sucks. Plus there is so much childish crap on there. I remember first finding Digg in 2005, then they opened it up to non-tech categories. It was still good, because I could get the feeds for categories I liked. They added images and pics, and I filtered that crap out as well. Then v4 happened and use went down and the categories went very narrow and it sucked.<p>I really wish Hacker News had categories, but it would very hard to categorize things. Right now I have a massive filter on Yahoo Pipes, but of its no where near perfect. All I can work with is the title of the story to filter things and link.
This sounds like the sensible way for a company to pick up an attractive team. Picking up a junk product along with the team is a horrible thing to do to shareholders in my view.