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Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

251 pointsby mikericealmost 13 years ago

22 comments

alaskamilleralmost 13 years ago
Reddit won the game, slow and steady. Reddit now literally powers the <i>generation</i> of news cycles across the blogerverse. BuzzFeed? HuffPo? Gawker? TheDaily? Reddit, yesterday.<p>First thing first is rescue the culture. Digg engineering already fled, the peanut gallery in the valley keeps squawking with delight about your failure, and all you have left is some nicely designed pages showing double digit gains on stale links that's a shade away from being as if they were spun up by a Russian spam squad. Save yourself, redo the logo, redo the color scheme, don't let legacy drag you down.<p>Second thing is do some soul searching, figuring out what layer Digg wants to play in. Links aggregation? Community building and content creation? Traffic? Attention? Engagement? That elusive ad sharing model for content creators?<p>After that figure out for who. Reddit's core is dying, and eventually it'll be fully crowded out by the mainstreaming of rage comics, aww pics, and counter-Tumblr-pseudo-nerdy programming. Do you target those people, the walking wounded much like Slashdot?<p>Or do you go after the youths, the ones addicted to Instagrams, 9gag, imgur, but bored of their Facebook feeds? Then play the waiting game. New is everything old, after all.<p>The game's so different now from 2005. All the majors have feeds now. All the majors have figured out sharing, commenting, and extracting action on a story item. On top of that you're competing against mobile guys like Flipboard.<p>This is one of those situations where execution is easier than creating an idea. What is Digg's $1MM idea? Good luck with that because Digg needs to be futuristic but also <i>really</i> lucky twice being at the right place, the right time, with the right idea. Once you're lucky, twice you're good, right?<p>I bet this kind of flame out, this one thing keeps Mark Zuckerberg from sleeping.
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jgroomealmost 13 years ago
&#62; 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.<p>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 place in the online world. Sad.<p>We have plenty of content aggregators now. The kind of people Digg 5.0 (?!) will target are probably more than happy finding their entertainment through Twitter, Facebook, and dare I say it, Reddit.<p>Having said that, I for one wish the new team all the luck in the world in trying to get the site back to its former glory, and I look forward to trying it out.
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marknutteralmost 13 years ago
This is a case of a company having delusions of grandeur. Instead of humming along with 10 or so employees raking in cash hand-over fist, they tried to grow as fast and as large as possible to try to revolutionize news. Instead, Reddit did the former and is stable and profitable; it never pretends to be something it's not.<p>Not all companies are going to change the world, nor should they. I see Facebook and Twitter making the same mistakes. Perhaps Facebook is a great place to keep in touch with friends but nothing more. Perhaps Twitter is simply a great replacement for blogging, nothing more. Instead of filling their niches and quietly making a small number of employees very wealthy, they try to become these massive institutions that are reliant on very fickle user bases. It's a house of cards.
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uptownalmost 13 years ago
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."<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304373804577523181002565776.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet" rel="nofollow">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230437380457752...</a>
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chimialmost 13 years ago
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 what it was, exactly.<p>Also, is this an example that illustrates why craigslist refuses to redesign their site? A redesign really could spell the end of craiglist like digg.
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bitwizealmost 13 years ago
Why? Reddit is like Digg 2 now. Back in the day Digg was for dudebros who wanted to swap girls gone wild links while Reddit was the "isn't Haskell grand?" place. But since about 2008 or so when Reddit rubbed up against Digg and 4chan and a big chunk of their user base rubbed off and clung to it, Digg has been made wholly redundant.
spinchangealmost 13 years ago
I used to love digg in the early days. People point to the v4 revision as being the final nail, but they started wavering and losing the magic literal years before that.<p>FWIW, Pligg (the digg clone CMS) looks like it's getting a twitter bootstrap upgrade. I've been wanting to roll my own "digg/reddit/HN" for ages. Maybe now's the time. <a href="http://www.pligg.com/demo/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pligg.com/demo/</a>
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feinalmost 13 years ago
I am incredibly skeptical about the plausibility of resurrecting Digg, but for 500k I sure hope they do. It was my first social media home and it would be nice to be able to go back to what it was; not a marketing front end for corporate prostitution.<p>Fingers crossed, but betaworks seems to want to take Digg in the direction it should have gone during the v2-&#62;v3 upgrade.
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Tobualmost 13 years ago
Digg is a shadow of an online community, but its fall gave us War, a three-part social media epic by ncomment: <a href="https://secure.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/3424896427/sizes/o/in/set-72157615924666317/" rel="nofollow">https://secure.flickr.com/photos/25036088@N06/3424896427/siz...</a>
untogalmost 13 years ago
I don't doubt that something can be done with it, but I'm dubious of Digg as a brand these days. Similar to MySpace, it's lost all the credibility it once had.
cantbecoolalmost 13 years ago
The first iteration of digg looks awfully like reddit.<p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20041230012732/http://digg.com/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20041230012732/http://digg.com/</a>
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dr_almost 13 years ago
From techcrunch: "Betaworks, says Digg, will soon unveil a new “cloud-based version of Digg” that will complement News.me’s iPhone and iPad apps" Not sure what this means, Digg was never a desktop client. It's betaworks using lingo that will grab the attention of non tech readers to suggest something interesting is going on. But it isn't. Just like with a lot of their other stuff. Bitly is a simple concept which has been done many times. News.me is nothing interesting at all, just an attempt to rip off Flipboard. Chartbeat is just another way to visualize data that's available by so many other means. Nothing original with betaworks.
zinssmeisteralmost 13 years ago
the german Digg clone Yigg.de also sold today. Funny how that timing works out. (<a href="http://yigg.de/nachrichten/2012/07/12/ekaabo-uebernimmt-yigg" rel="nofollow">http://yigg.de/nachrichten/2012/07/12/ekaabo-uebernimmt-yigg</a>)
paulbjensenalmost 13 years ago
This should be a film, the story has everything: business press coverage, the BluRay code event, death threats to the founder, a near-deal with Google, the exit of the CEO, the 4.0 debacle, the company downsizes, the founder leaves, the company struggles, then the company sells it's shell.<p>I hope BusinessWeek does a piece on this.
dreadswordalmost 13 years ago
$500k: hard to tell if they've over- or under- paid. What's the Digg Balance Sheet look like? How about the last year of cash flow statements? Without those, its impossible to evaluate the worthiness of the deal.
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PaulHoulealmost 13 years ago
the trouble is that fixing Digg means getting rid of the existing user base
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saurikalmost 13 years ago
I wonder what they consider the "core assets" to be; some specific items I'm curious about: domain name, codebase, hosting contracts, Aeron chairs, employees.
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synackalmost 13 years ago
I imagine it'll end up costing them quite a bit more than $500k when the dust settles... Digg probably has quite a bit of debt racked up by now.
ruhsleralmost 13 years ago
news.me + digg could be good
adventurefulalmost 13 years ago
The only reason it's $500k and not $0 is to save a small amount of face. Digg is losing money, and has never made money in its entire history, so it's going to cost Betaworks a lot more than $500k to take it over.
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CubicleNinjasalmost 13 years ago
How the mighty have fallen...
anewguyalmost 13 years ago
How much do you think it would cost to buy reddit?
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